About

I'm Ryan Lamb. My family and I run Lamb Screen Printing in San Diego, and I've been in this trade for over 25 years. I also build software, which started because the tools I could buy did not do the math the way a shop actually works.

AutoPrintShop is where those two things meet. It is not a software company with a marketing department. It is one shop's checklists, calculators and quote terms, published so other shop owners can skip the parts I learned the slow way, with tools to follow.

The shop is older than I am in it. In the 1980s it belonged to my uncle, trading as John Lamb Productions. My parents, Rex and Kathy, took it over at the turn of the nineties and put the family name on it.

The early years were large contract accounts, printing other people's brands at volume. When that work thinned out, we survived on the jobs nobody else would take. Sandals. Neoprene, which almost nobody could get ink to stay on. For a stretch in the nineties, if you pulled on a wetsuit, there is a good chance the logo came off our press. That is where this shop learned that the interesting money is in the work other people turn down.