Dexter Schiller
New Member
Greetings and salutations,
Finally decided to take the plunge and sign up instead of just lurking around the forums! Ya'll have been an excellent resource for a variety of questions I've had come up over the past year.
A little bit about me and my shop-
I started a sign shop on accident for the most part. In college I had to get an internship or start a business as part of my degree program. Wanting to avoid the unpaid part of modern internships, I started making miniature models for historical wargames and model railroads in a makerspace near my university.
Realizing that there was quite a bit of demand for my "glorified dollhouses for men," I decided it would be prudent to get a laser cutter of my own. After about a year of running my shop out of my folks shed, I realized I needed a squidge more space.
I managed to find a print shop that was willing to sublease a corner of their facilities to me, and thus started me down a path to signmanship. Soon after moving in, I negotiated a deal with the printshop to have them print some of my models on their flatbed printer. The miniature community was blown away at my little widgets considering they didn't need to paint them, and I launched a kickstarter to buy the required materials (pallet quantity anything was beyond my recent grad budget)
Everything was going swimmingly until a few months into fabrication when I was delivered the news that the print shop of which I resided and relied was closing down.Unwilling to be yet another Kickstarted project, I girded my britches and started plotting my way to an office and flatbed printer of my own!
A few months later, after production settled down and my clients were pleased, I was approached by a designer who was curious if I made signs... I guess it was time to go from miniature to 1:1 scale!
Long story short, I found myself a partner with decades of print experience and opened "Schiller Reed."
Now I have a 12,000 sq.ft. production facility in Denver with a multitude of printers, CNC machines, laminators etc.
I hope that I can serve this community now that I've got a bit of experience wrangling these machines instead of just mooching off its insightful threads.
Thanks for reading, and see you around!
Dexter
Finally decided to take the plunge and sign up instead of just lurking around the forums! Ya'll have been an excellent resource for a variety of questions I've had come up over the past year.
A little bit about me and my shop-
I started a sign shop on accident for the most part. In college I had to get an internship or start a business as part of my degree program. Wanting to avoid the unpaid part of modern internships, I started making miniature models for historical wargames and model railroads in a makerspace near my university.
Realizing that there was quite a bit of demand for my "glorified dollhouses for men," I decided it would be prudent to get a laser cutter of my own. After about a year of running my shop out of my folks shed, I realized I needed a squidge more space.
I managed to find a print shop that was willing to sublease a corner of their facilities to me, and thus started me down a path to signmanship. Soon after moving in, I negotiated a deal with the printshop to have them print some of my models on their flatbed printer. The miniature community was blown away at my little widgets considering they didn't need to paint them, and I launched a kickstarter to buy the required materials (pallet quantity anything was beyond my recent grad budget)
Everything was going swimmingly until a few months into fabrication when I was delivered the news that the print shop of which I resided and relied was closing down.Unwilling to be yet another Kickstarted project, I girded my britches and started plotting my way to an office and flatbed printer of my own!
A few months later, after production settled down and my clients were pleased, I was approached by a designer who was curious if I made signs... I guess it was time to go from miniature to 1:1 scale!
Long story short, I found myself a partner with decades of print experience and opened "Schiller Reed."
Now I have a 12,000 sq.ft. production facility in Denver with a multitude of printers, CNC machines, laminators etc.
I hope that I can serve this community now that I've got a bit of experience wrangling these machines instead of just mooching off its insightful threads.
Thanks for reading, and see you around!
Dexter
