We were lucky to catch up with Kristen Sassenfeld recently and have shared our conversation below.

Kristen, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

Most screen printing operations use automatic presses and focus on churning out massive numbers of t-shirts. Usually they aren’t able to focus on details or do specialty orders. We are a manual-press only shop and we print every single item by hand. We do this because we are focused on putting out a high-quality and long-lasting product. Printing is not necessarily a means to an end for us, but more a craft that we learn from constantly.

It’s incredible to take a concept that someone wasn’t expecting to become real, and turn it into a tangible item. They don’t get to see the hard work behind the scenes but we’re so appreciative when they are happy with the final product.

Sometimes this works against us. We still get 5000 unit orders and every single one has to be printed by hand. There have been some marathon print days (and weeks)! It’s fun to know you’ve touched every shirt that someone will wear to a race or buy at a concert. We love feeling personally invested in the creation of special pieces for local artists and we have so much pride in what we do.

Kristen, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Afternoon Printing is a female-owned and operated screen printing shop focusing on apparel, posters and design. We print and design merchandise for artists, bands, charities, restaurants, and many other small businesses. We take customer’s artwork, illustrations, logos and ideas and turn them into tangible merchandise for sale and advertising.

All of our employees fell in love with the process of screen printing at one time or another, and we are very fortunate to enjoy our work! When an order comes in, it usually gets touched by every member of our staff before it goes out the door. This ensures that each order is printed with precision and care. Our art department can create a design from scratch, or puzzles out how to turn a client’s artwork into a screen-printable image. Our print assistants prep all the screens for print and match ink colors from the mockup. The printers set up the design on one of our two manual printing presses and print it by hand. Lastly, our print assistant presses each shirt for a better hand feel, checks print quality, double checks quantities, and packs up the order for pickup or shipping.

Our favorite moments are seeing clients’ reactions when they come to pick up their order and they see how their idea has come to life. Most of our clients have been working with us for years and live or work within a 5-mile radius of our shop, so we are very much a neighborhood operation. We love working in South Minneapolis and we are so appreciative of the support we’ve gotten from the wonderful people in this city!

Let’s move on to buying businesses – can you talk to us about your experience with business acquisitions?

We bought Afternoon Printing! Both of Afternoon Printing’s current owners were employed by the shop for several years before purchasing it–Kristen for 10+ years, Sofie for about 5 years. We poured our blood, sweat, and tears into this print shop for years, and became great friends in the process.. After taking on more and more responsibility from the previous owner we decided it was time to go all in!

We finalized our purchase of Afternoon Printing in January of 2023 after over a year of negotiations with advisors, CPAs and lawyers. It was a long and arduous process, made more difficult by the fact that neither one of us really knew what we were doing. We owe a big thank you to our advisor at the Small Business Association, and our lawyer who was very good at explaining things to us in a way that was understandable.

Because we were already running most aspects of the business, there weren’t too many new responsibilities to take on, but the things we did have to take over were complicated and completely unrelated to what we had been doing. Things like insurance, taxes, payroll, and quickbooks. There has certainly been a learning curve, but we get better at it every day.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

Creating a fun and easygoing work environment has been a huge factor for us. We are lucky to have employees who are excited about the work they’re doing; we trust our employees with a lot of responsibility and they repay us by doing excellent work. While we value and encourage hard work, we also balance it out with flexible hours and benefits like unlimited sick days and plenty of paid time off. Having a small and close-knit staff allows us to be generous with time off and compassionate when life stuff gets in the way. When the print schedule gets crazy, our employees step up and work overtime to make sure everything gets done, with Kristen and Sofie taking on the bulk of the extra production work.

We also have family lunch every day; no matter how busy we are, we stop everything at 1pm and watch an episode of Survivor together in the break room while we eat. It’s important to socialize and check in with everyone. A good work environment can only exist when everyone wants to be there and it’s our main goal to make this a job our employees want to come in to.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.afternoonprinting.com
• Instagram: @afternoonprinting
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/afternoonprinting/
• Twitter: @aftnprnt