
Live Screen Printing
Real presses, real ink, real squeegee pulls — the classic shirt-off-the-press moment that stops foot traffic cold.
Explore the formatLive · we print on-site
We bring the print shop to the party. Screen printing, DTF, hat bars, embroidery, and engraving — produced live in front of your guests, by a crew that turns a booth into the longest line at the event.
What this is
A live merch activation is a brand activation where the merch is made in front of your guests — not handed out of a box. We roll real screen-printing presses, DTF stations, hat bars, embroidery machines, and laser engravers into your event, staff them with a crew that performs the craft, and let attendees choose a design, watch it printed, and wear it out the door.
The difference is behavioral. Pre-printed swag gets grabbed and forgotten; experiential merch gets queued for. The press becomes a stage, the line becomes social proof, and every finished piece leaves as a photographed, worn, talked-about artifact of your brand. That’s why event producers and brand managers use live printing to anchor trade show booths, conferences, festivals, and launch parties.
Six ways to print live
Run one format as a focused experience or combine several into a full merch midway. Every station arrives crewed, branded, and dialed to your guest count.
How it works
Send the date, city, headcount, and vibe. You get a line-itemed quote within 24 hours — crew, equipment, blanks, and art prep included, no hourly-rate mystery math.
Our art team preps your designs for press: separations, patch layouts, ink colors matched to brand guidelines. We’ll recommend a menu of 2–4 designs that prints fast and photographs well.
The crew loads in early, builds a booth that matches your campaign, and prints up to 60 pieces an hour per press while guests watch their piece get made.
No tote-bag landfill. Your logo walks out on people’s backs, shows up in their photos that night, and keeps working long after the venue lights come up.
Proof, not promises
Ballrooms, convention floors, backlots, and after-dark patios — a few frames from the road.





The case for live
Swag bags are a logistics line item. A live printing activation is programming — it gives guests something to do, watch, and post. Same budget category, completely different outcome.
Based in Fullerton, CA
Orange County, Los Angeles, and San Diego book with no travel fee. Everywhere else, the road cases ride along and a travel fee joins the quote — we’ve printed in 48 states and counting.
Straight answers
Most activations land between $7.5K and $30K depending on guest count, hours on site, the formats you choose, and the garments or goods we’re decorating. That figure covers the crew, the equipment, the blanks, and art prep — it’s not an equipment rental plus surprises. Send us your date and headcount and you’ll have a line-itemed quote within 24 hours. See our pricing page for the full breakdown.
A single press with a merch table runs comfortably in a 10×10 booth. Our standard two-press, two-station footprint is happiest in a 10×20, which leaves room for the line to form inside your space instead of blocking the aisle. Hat bars and engraving stations can squeeze onto an 8-foot table. We’ve printed in hotel foyers, ballroom corners, lobbies, and parking lots — here’s the full space guide.
Two standard 120V/20A circuits cover a typical two-station setup — ordinary wall outlets, no generators or special drops. Heat-sealing equipment and flash units are the hungriest pieces, so we just ask that our circuits aren’t shared with the DJ rig or the coffee machines. We confirm power, load-in path, and floor protection with your venue contact during pre-production so nothing surprises anyone on event day.
Two to three weeks is the comfortable runway: it gives us time to dial in artwork, order garments in your sizes and colors, and coordinate with the venue. That said, events don’t always cooperate — we regularly turn around rush activations in under a week when blanks are available. Quotes always come back within 24 hours, so the fastest move is simply to send the brief.
Up to about 60 pieces per hour, per press, for a one- or two-color screen print. Our standard crew runs two printers and two stations, so a four-hour window can put several hundred finished pieces into guests’ hands. DTF, embroidery, and engraving run at different speeds — when the goal is volume we’ll spec the lineup so the queue keeps moving and nobody walks away empty-handed.
Yes — and it should be. The presses are magnetic on their own, but we’ll dress the footprint to match your campaign: branded table wraps, backdrops, signage, screen frames taped in your colors, even ink colors matched to brand guidelines. Some clients build us into a full custom set; others hand us a logo file two weeks out. Either way the activation photographs like part of your brand, not a vendor table.
Constantly. Orange County, Los Angeles, and San Diego are home turf with no travel fee. Beyond SoCal we cover the rest of the country — Vegas, Phoenix, Austin, Chicago, New York, Miami, and most cities in between — with a travel fee added to the quote. The crew and gear arrive the same way either way: early, road-cased, and ready. Browse the cities we serve.
We do, and it’s included in the quote. We supply retail-quality blanks — tees, hoodies, hats, totes, bottles, tumblers — in the brands, colorways, and size runs that fit your crowd. If you have garments you love or co-branded inventory already produced, we can print on supplied goods too; we’ll just confirm fabric compatibility during art prep so every piece comes off the press clean.
Get a quote
Date, city, headcount, and what you want guests walking away wearing. That’s enough for us to build a real plan — formats, crew, throughput, and a number.
Most activations land between $7.5K – $30KEvery quote is line-itemed and lands in your inbox within 24 hours. No hourly-rate roulette, no hidden gear fees. Prefer a human first?