This post is written by guest blogger, Steven Amrhein, Intern at Old Town Cape.
Baseball's Spring Training has begun and hopefully Cards nation can book another trip to the World Series in 2014. I work at JCPenney where anything St. Louis Cardinals is big business and I always wondered how this past season's National League Championship Series shirts showed up on store racks the very next day. Someone mentioned that Horizon Screen Printing prints St. Louis Cardinals merchandise, so I sat down with Dru Reeves, owner of Horizon Screen Printing, and learned some pretty interesting stories - who know that World Series Championship shirts are printed right here in downtown Cape!
Horizon Screen Printing sits on Broadway and is known for making quality t-shirts for a wide variety of clients in and around Cape Girardeau. Starting in the early 1980s, the business grew in size and was actually approached by VF Imagewear, the company that holds licenses to Majestic, Wrangler, and Jansport, to start mass producing St. Louis championship clothing. Reeves says that all major cities have a local screen printer since VF Imagewear is located in Miami, FL.
Smoothly executed by Reeves and his employees, the process has stayed the same for the past 20 years. Once a win is declared, Horizon starts printing immediately after. They work non-stop for 24 hours before taking a small break, only to get back to the presses with another 24 hour workday. So, if the Cardinals win the World Series at 10 p.m., the printing starts at 10:30 p.m. because the design has already been submitted. Within a few hours, the first truck shows up and arrives again at 5 a.m. to take the t-shirts back to St. Louis.
Three operating presses pump out 600 t-shirts per hour, manned by a ten person team. The total stock supplies 10,000 t-shirts to be distributed all over Cape Girardeau and back to the bigger cities. Stores that get clothing from Horizon include major retailers such as JCPenney, Macy's, Dillards, and Sears. Horizon gets big business if the Cardinals win! Reeves also has his fingers crossed for the Rams next year and currently for the Blues, since his contract covers MLB, NFL, and NHL as well. He has completed t-shirts for the Cardinals when winning their division before, but doing so is less common because VF Imagewear has more time to print and the t-shirts sell less than the World Series.
Mark McGwire's 62nd homerun in 1998 still holds Reeves' most challenging t-shirt printing operation. He explains it as being different than a World Series win because there is a designated number of games in the World Series and the team only has to win 4 out of 7 games. Reeves even has an estimated date ahead of time on when he will start printing the World Series t-shirts; twice he even received the green light on printing before the final game was played. However, McGwire could have broken the record during any game, and it just so happened to be a day that Reeves was in St. Louis. He had to pack up his bags, make some calls, and head home immediately to start printing.
The last thing Reeves left me with is mention of one of his pride and joys, a St. Louis Stallions t-shirt. Who are the St. Louis Stallions you may ask? Reeves is fond of knowing that he owns one of the only printed shirts of the football team. Before the Rams came to St. Louis, NFL was thinking about the Stallions becoming a team, and the design for their t-shirts was ready at Horizon to be printed by the thousands. Unfortunately, Reeves then got word that the team would not come to fruition, so before putting the design away forever, he turned on the printing press for one shirt only, which he owns to this day.