Industries — Producers 01

Decorators

You don't lose money at the press. You lose it in the hours before a job reaches it, in the work you never went out and won, and in the weeks after it ships. InkIQ takes that work.

Where the money goes

Nine places a shop bleeds.
And one you can just ask.

Every one is skilled, repetitive and invisible on a P&L. Each has an agent.


01 — Retail enquiries

Three days to answer
a simple question.

"Can you do 250 hoodies, logo on the front, need them for the 22nd." No sizes, no colourway, no usable artwork. Someone reads it, works out what's missing, writes back, waits, gets half an answer, writes again. Meanwhile the shop down the road quoted on Tuesday and won it.

  • Email, phone call or web form — all become one structured request
  • Every attachment opened: colours counted, stitches estimated at the sewn size, resolution checked
  • "Gildan 5000, black, S–XL" resolved to a real catalogue product at your preferred vendor
  • The missing details asked for automatically, in your voice, on your schedule
  • Priced on your own tables, so a new hire quotes the way the owner does in week one

This is the part that usually only one or two people in the building can do. It stops being a bottleneck, and it stops leaving with them.

Request 8812 · retail enquiry
ArrivedEmail, 16:52
ProductMatched
Artwork4 colours read
SizesMissing
Ship-toMissing
Complete72%

“Happy to get this priced today — could you confirm the size breakdown and the delivery address? The artwork you sent is print ready.”

Sent16:58, same day

02 — Contract purchase orders

A purchase order is a document.
It should arrive as data.

Contract work doesn't come as a conversation. It comes as a twelve-page PDF, a spreadsheet, a portal export or a scan — and somebody keys it in line by line, interpreting the size matrix as they go. One mistyped cell ships the wrong colour to a customer you can't afford to annoy.

  • PDFs, spreadsheets, portal exports, scans and photographs of paperwork all read
  • Size-and-colour matrices read as a grid, not flattened into a total
  • Lines matched to your catalogue with that account's contract pricing applied
  • Revised POs reconciled against the original instead of creating a duplicate
  • Anything ambiguous flagged for a human rather than guessed at

Order entry becomes a review step: nine lines confirmed, one flagged, thirty seconds of attention instead of twenty minutes of typing.

PO-88214.pdf → order
PO number88214
In-hands14 Sep
Heavyweight tee · NavyMatched · contract price1,200
180
S
420
M
400
L
200
XL
Fleece hood · CharcoalTwo products match this descriptionReview
Lines read9 of 10 confirmed

03 — The customers you have

Your best pipeline is
already in your database.

The team that ordered every April hasn't been prompted. The customer who bought tees never got asked about hoodies for winter. And the one campaign you did send went to everybody at once, which is why almost nobody opened it.

  • Reorder prompts when a customer's annual or seasonal job comes due
  • Segments built from what people actually bought — method, product, spend, season, last order date
  • Campaigns aimed at a segment that makes sense, not blasted to the whole list
  • Branded presentations and catalogues built from your own products, sent as a trackable link
  • Company stores so a client's staff order their own kit — recurring revenue you don't have to quote
  • A customer portal for status, tracking and reorders, so "where's my order?" stops being a phone call
Segments · ready to send
Bought tees, never hoodiesWinter range · 84 customersUpsell
Annual order dueOrdered Apr last year · 23 customersReorder
Embroidery onlyNever quoted screen print · 41Cross-sell
No order in 12 monthsSpent over $5k previously · 17Win back

Four campaigns to four audiences, instead of one email to everybody.


04 — The customers you don't

Waiting for the phone to ring
is not a sales strategy.

Most shops have no outbound at all. Hiring a salesperson is a real salary before a single order lands, so growth stays tied to referrals and whoever happens to find you.

  • Outbound sequences personalised to the recipient and their business — not one template with a name swapped in
  • Follow-ups that stop the moment someone replies
  • Replies land in the same inbox as everything else and become requests automatically
  • Deliverability tooling — domain warm-up and sending limits — so your mail reaches inboxes instead of spam
  • Unsubscribe handling and sending rules built in, because outbound email is regulated

The point isn't volume. It's that prospecting happens every week without anyone having to be the person who does it.

Outbound · breweries within 50 miles
Step 1Opening email
Step 2+3 days if no reply
Step 3+6 days · different angle
212
Contacted
38
Replied
9
Requests
3
Quoted

Sequence stops automatically on reply. Every reply becomes a request in the same queue as inbound.


05 — Nothing goes quiet

Most quotes don't lose.
They just go quiet.

The quote went out Thursday. Nobody replied, three more came in, and two weeks later somebody asks whatever happened with the brewery. Following up is nobody's job specifically, which means it's nobody's job at all.

  • Every quote chased on a timer you set, in your voice, referencing the actual job
  • Approval reminders that cancel themselves the moment the customer approves
  • Deals on a board with the stages your shop actually uses — nothing sits "somewhere in the inbox"
  • Every thread filed against the customer and the order, so history doesn't live in one person's mailbox
Waiting on the customer
Harbour BrewingQuote sent 4 days ago · no replyChasing
Northside AthleticsFollow-up scheduled +2 daysQueued
Cedar Park SchoolsProof sent · reminder at 48 hApproval
Meridian GroupReplied — moved to QuotingLive

06 — Art & approvals

The mockup shouldn't cost
half an afternoon.

Find a template, place the logo, guess whether 3.5 inches looks right on a youth small, export, email, wait. Then "can we see it in navy?" and you start again. And somewhere there's a folder called ART_FINAL_v3 that nobody trusts.

  • Mockups on the real garment at the real print size, using the supplier's own size chart
  • Every colourway rendered without rebuilding anything
  • Artwork versioned on the job, so the approved file is the one that goes to the press
  • Approvals sent as a link, with the decision recorded and dated
  • Move a logo by hand and the system places the next one closer to how you actually do it
Proof · heavyweight tee · 3 colourways
Rendered
Front centre12.0 in
Left chest3.5 in
Size runYS–XXL, true to chart
Artworkv4 · approved
StatusApproved Tue 16:02

Reminder was scheduled for +48 h and cancelled on approval.


07 — Procurement

Six tabs open, one order,
everything typed twice.

Check stock at one supplier, then a second because the first is short in XL, then compare landed cost and type the same numbers into your own system. A colour goes on backorder and nobody finds out until the box arrives light.

  • Supplier catalogues and live stock inside the job, not in six browser tabs
  • A preferred vendor per product, so the right SKU at the right supplier is chosen the same way every time
  • Purchase orders generated from the order and split across suppliers automatically
  • Inbound shipments tracked, so production knows what has actually landed
  • Landed cost carried into the job rather than estimated afterwards
Purchase order · PO-2291
Heavyweight tee · BlackPreferred vendor · 2-day transit240
S / M / L48 / 84 / 72
XL / XXL24 / 12
Fleece hood · CharcoalShort in XL — split to second vendorSplit
Landed cost$4.60 / pc
StatusConfirmed

08 — Production

The schedule lives on a whiteboard
and in one person's head.

A seven-colour job can't run on the six-colour manual. The auto has a hundred-piece minimum. Screens have to be burned before anything prints. Somebody knows all of it, and when they're away the shop guesses.

  • Stations are your machines — colour limits, head counts, capacity and minimums from the equipment you own
  • Jobs scheduled by stage: art, screens, print, embroider, finish, pack
  • The agent places each stage on a machine that can actually run it, on a day with capacity
  • Capacity visible while you quote, so nobody promises a date the floor can't hit
  • Overflow routed to an outsource partner when you are genuinely full
  • Staff clock in against the job at the station, so labour lands on the cost sheet
Production · week of the 14th
Auto · 20 col
Manual · 6 col
Emb · 12 head
DTF
Finishing
Placed by agent4 of 6 jobs
7-colour jobauto only — manual can't run it
Next open slotThu 18th

09 — Data & analytics

Most shops are run on
gut feel and memory.

Ask an owner which decoration method makes the most money, which customer is quietly unprofitable, or what share of quotes convert, and you'll get an instinct rather than a number. The data exists — it's spread across six systems and nobody has time to assemble it.

  • Margin per machine hour by method, conversion rate by stage, true enquiry-to-shipped time — answerable instantly instead of never
  • Hundreds of metrics across sales, production, art, purchasing, workforce and cash, each with period-over-period movement
  • Everyone picks their own dashboard, and margin, cost and payroll stay behind a role
  • Ask in plain English — "how many black tees did we embroider left-chest last quarter, and at what margin?"
  • A written brief each morning: what ships today, what's at risk, what cash came in
  • Job costing on the same engine as your quote, plus aged receivables, payment links and reminders

Which method actually makes money. Which customer costs more than they pay. Which stage jobs die at. Most shops have never been able to see any of it.

Margin per machine hour · last 90 days
Embroidery
Screen · auto
DTF
Screen · manual
31%
Quote → order
6.4d
Enquiry → ship
34.1%
Actual margin
39.5%
Quoted margin

The manual press earns a third of what the embroidery floor does per hour. Most shops have never had a way to see that.


10 — Ask it anything

The one you actually
talk to.

The other agents work in the background. Reggie sits in a panel beside whatever you're doing, knows how the software works and can query your live data — so the answer is about your business, not a help article. And it doesn't just answer: it does things.

  • Ask about your own numbers in plain English and get the answer, not a report to go build
  • Ask how something in InkIQ works and get the answer for your setup, not generic documentation
  • Tell it to do the job — create a task, draft the follow-up, build the quote, start the mockup
  • Send it a screenshot when something looks wrong and it will tell you what it's looking at
  • Anything that reaches a customer or changes a record sits behind a confirmation, and every action is logged
  • Chat history is kept, so the thread you had last month is still there

It also writes the brief that lands in your inbox each morning — in plain English, in the format you asked for.

Reggie · this morning

“How many black tees did we embroider left-chest last quarter, and what was the average margin?”

Pieces3,480
Orders19
Average margin36.2%

“Draft a follow-up to the four customers who haven’t replied to a quote this week.”

DraftedReady to review
SendsNeeds your confirmation

Nothing reaches a customer without a click. Every action it takes is written to the audit log.


The roster

Six agents. One shop.

Each owns a job that currently eats somebody's afternoon — and hands back finished work, not a summary of it.

Agent

PO Processing

Reads contract purchase orders in any format and turns them into confirmed orders, flagging what it can't resolve.

Agent

Sales

Works retail enquiries into complete requests, chases quotes, prompts reorders and runs outbound sequences.

Agent

Customer Service

Answers status questions, handles approvals and reminders, and keeps every thread filed against the job.

Agent

Procurement

Sources across your suppliers, applies the preferred vendor, and raises the purchase orders the job needs.

Agent

Production Scheduling

Places each stage on a machine that can actually run it, on a day with capacity. Override it whenever you like.

Agent

Artwork

Opens every file, counts colours, estimates stitches at size, and builds the mockups and proofs.

Same team. More jobs out the door.

None of this replaces the people who know your shop. It removes the part of their day that never needed a human in it — and it means the knowledge that currently lives in one or two heads is finally written down somewhere.

Bring us a real job

Watch it do the job.

Send us one real enquiry — the email, the purchase order, the artwork, the messy bits — and we'll run it through the agents in the first ten minutes of the call. That's a faster argument than anything we could write here.