Decorator Profile One of a kind
Garment decorators come in all shapes and sizes. There is no stereotype that can be made. P&P editor Melanie Attlesey speaks with Mike Cadman of Murgens Keep, who is certainly one of a kind.
Mike Cadman of Murgens Keep M
ike is the kind of man who would look better placed fronting a heavy metal band or riding a motorbike with his hair blowing in the wind behind him. Not printing T shirts for the local gym.
“I’m a six foot two, hairy biker and built like an outhouse!” laughs Mike. But printing T shirts is just what he has done for the past 30 years.
Mike’s story of how he ended up in the industry is fairly typical. An accidental happening. Back in the 80s and 90s Mike was a silversmith and specialised in making custom silver jewellery which he sold at bike rallies and music festivals. However, the recession of the early 90s saw the price of silver go through the roof and Mike found he could no longer compete with the competition from overseas manufacturers. While making his jewellery, Mike was also designing prints for T shirt manufacturers in America for the music scene, which he got printed through a third-party. With his jewellery business on the decline, Mike took the plunge and decided to buy his own equipment to start printing his own T shirts and it’s from here that Murgens Keep began to flourish.
How easy can it be?
“I thought how easy is it to be a printer! So, I brought a little Redsail RS720c plotter and a press from eBay and started taking them out on the road. The plotter sounded like dial up internet. It was so noisy you could hear it from a thousand yards away,” says Mike.
In the early days, Mike rented properties throughout Manchester, including one in the Corn Exchange which was blown
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www.printwearandpromotion.co.uk
up by the IRA in June 1996. Another property was in Manchester’s old Coliseum independent shopping centre, which has now been converted to flats, and another was in a derelict building in Preston, which Mike managed to secure rent free for three years from the landlord on the understanding he renovated the unit completely.
Wanting to secure the future of his business and move away from the whims of landlords, Mike purchased his current premises in Walkden in 2014. Mike describes his studio as compact and bijou. Every inch of usable space and shelving is covered with either a printer, heat press or an embroidery machine. Equipment ranges from Melco EMT16X embroidery machines, heat presses from Pressmech, an Oki Pro920WT white toner printer, a Texjet Plus Advanced DTG printer and various other items. “The EMT16X is a fantastic machine and the great thing about Pressmech is that they can make you a platen of any size,” explains Mike.
The vast majority of this equipment was sourced from a visit to Printwear & Promotion LIVE! seven years ago, ready to kit out the new studio from top to
Mike’s workspace Mike’s unit in Walkden
bottom. “My wife and I love coming to the exhibition. We’re like kids in a sweet shop when we go! We love looking at all the new equipment which will just make our lives easier,” says Mike.
The most recent addition to Mike’s collection is a Roland TrueVIS SG2-300 colour printer, which was installed in June in the middle of lockdown. To fit the two-metre-wide machine in, Mike says an extension had to be built.
“That got finished and the day after the printer turned up,” says Mike. “Usually the machine arrives with two Roland engineers who install it for you, but not this time because of lockdown. The box got dumped in the car park and off the delivery driver went. We actually commissioned it all ourselves. John Harrison from Amaya phones us up a few hours later to find out how we were getting on, and I said to him ‘all I need are the IP codes, mate, I’m on it’. He couldn’t believe it! He was expecting me to still be building the stand.”
A God send
For Mike this machine has been a God send. “We’ve had the printer for nearly a year now and are on our third set of TR2 inks and
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