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IS
DECORATOR PROFILE
FEBRUARY 2017 images 67
“At 19 I had to get out of London
and the oil rigs seemed as a
good a place as any to hide,”
begins Graham Ridley, owner
of Retro Activewear. It’s an unexpected
start to an interview about a life in screen
printing!
His time on the rigs in the late ‘70s saw
him hand paint a badge on a bag for a
rig and then everybody wanted one. One
book from Reeves art shop in Kensington
later and he was screen printing bags and
T-shirts for all the rigs in the company.
After the Alexander Kielland rig sunk
nearby and a minor helicopter engine fail,
Graham, with massive understatement,
says he thought it might be time for a new
vocation away from the sea. He started
working for himself in the 1980s printing
football club merchandise: the licensing
industry was in its infancy at that time and
football merch was not yet readily availa-
ble. In 1985, Things Fashions, aka Things,
bought out his business and he took on
the role of Things’ production director.
He says he “drifted into T-shirts” but
it’s hard to picture Graham drifting into
anything. By his own admission, he is an
ambitious person and once he decided on
T-shirts, he threw himself into it. “I have
an enquiring mind – I like to know how
things work,” he says. “I learnt it all from
books initially and then trial and error and
questions.”
John Mason of JT Keeps, who is now the
managing director of Rutland Inks, was a
formative influence and played a central
role in furthering Graham’s screen printing
education. “Nobody wanted to tell you
anything in those days. Then I met John
competition coming through in the UK
that were good companies, so they were
nibbling away at our ankles; we lost all the
Adidas work to Turkey; and the rock and
roll industry become quite political and we
lost certain accounts.”
Graham decided to go to America where
he set up a company in Colorado. He
then came back to the UK and took on
the managing director role at Local Boyz
Group. It had an annual turnover of £33
million that sold Chinese-made fashion
tees to various businesses, including a
small, rapidly growing UK company called
Sports Direct.
Since returning to the UK he has con-
tinued to print T-shirts, ending up back at
Things which he now owns and has re-
named Retro Activewear. He’s still based in
the east end of London and has as many
ideas and plans now as he did when he
was starting out. He was one of the first to
buy a DTG digital printer–a machine that
was, he admits, “rubbish”.
Despite this shaky start, in 1996, in an
earlier Images interview, Graham boldly
predicted that in five years there would
be a digital revolution. It’s taken nearer 20
years, he says, but we’re seeing it now. “I
predicted that there would be digital ma-
chines based on the hexachrome system
with a discharge first colour down. The
early digital machines were four-colour
process but now we’re seeing hexa-
chrome-type systems with discharge.
“They haven’t cracked it yet, though.
In my opinion, the manufacturers don’t
get enough printers involved–they use
scientists instead, and don’t bring in the
practical expertise enough.”
Retro Activewear currently has a Kornit
Breeze and Graham expects to expand
the digital side of the business massively
when his new venture–www.varsitypunk.
com–goes live at the end of February.
“My biggest mistake was not carrying on
with my digital project eight years ago. We
got sidetracked, but we’re going to catch
up again now with Varsity Punk. Looking
at the wider industry, it’s breathtaking
what’s happening out there in fulfilment
and he became a mentor to me. He was
innovative and he was different.” Together
with John, Graham began experimenting
with different inks to discover what was
possible. “There was massive innovation in
those days. We were experimenting with
plastisol discharges, discharge and plasti-
sol high opacity, soft hand inks–we played
with them all during the 80s and 90s.”
It wasn’t just inks that Graham spent
time investigating, he did the same with
screen printing machinery. During Things’
heyday he had an engineer on his team
and together they built and modified the
machinery the company used to create its
award-winning prints. “It was bloody hard
work – we’d work 12-14 hours a day–
but we enjoyed it.” He was also work-
ing alongside Adrian Root at this time:
“Adrian was quiet, he had incredibly high
standards and he was a visionary – in my
opinion one of the most influential men
ever to grace this industry, but never one
to want recognition. Chalk and cheese, we
made a great team.”
The highs and lows
By 1992, when the first issue of Images
came out with Graham on the cover, he
was overseeing an 80,000 square foot
factory in east London and 180 staff.
“I came into an enormous factory, ab-
solutely empty. I took it from 30 staff to
180 staff at its height in 1998, and from
£3 million turnover a year to £14 mil-
lion with very healthy profits. That was
at the absolute height, when the UK was
printing T-shirts for everyone. We were
the biggest independent and possibly the
best company technically, quality wise and
for innovation. And then the wheels fell
off the industry in many ways. Not just for
us: for everyone. We, as an industry, had
prostituted our skills to the Turkish and
the Chinese in the form of consultants,
and we saw these foreign markets go
from being cowboys to excellent printers
with cheap labour and, in those days, few
checks or accreditation requirements–and
they were much cheaper than we were.
“The whole industry levelled out. We had
We take a piece of cotton and put
a piece of art on it. How cool is that?
Graham [white shirt] on the first Images cover