by Carrie Resch
Staff Writer
Downtown screen-printing company Vivid Images U.S.A. scored a touchdown when it landed the Reebok contract for Super Bowl merchandise.
The football season commanded big business for the small company with 10 employees. Over 40,000 t-shirts were printed for the AFC and NFC championship games and the Super Bowl combined. There were several designs for the shirts, about 15 designs for the Super Bowl alone.
“I’ve just always been hooked up with football in Jacksonville,” said company president Dan Tapper.
His connections led him to the contract for those games when he hooked up with a man he worked with for Jaguar merchandise.
“In all those games, you set up for both scenarios because you don’t know who is going to win the game,” Tapper said. “You just kind of wait and see. As soon as the game is over or as soon as the score is so high that you know who is going to win, you start printing and you don’t stop until all the orders are filled.”
Before striking out on his own seven years ago, Tapper worked as an art director with another screen-printing company that had handled the Jacksonville Jaguar merchandise from the start.
“Our company printed the shirts for Touchdown Jacksonville, the original group which worked to bring in an NFL team, and then we were the first to print the Jaguars shirts when they announced the team,” Tapper said.
The Jaguars are Tapper’s No. 1 customer today.
“I’ve been doing screen-printing for about 20 years, so my background really wasn’t a business background. It was an art background which is kind of unusual,” Tapper said.
“The hardest thing is cash flow and every day you have to make sure that you’re getting paid. If you don’t have partners, you have to have really good customers and a good relationship with your bank.”
Vivid Images primarily offers print t-shirts and embroidery on hats, polo shirts and bags, but they also do ad specialty items for clients such as logo printing on pens and cups.
“That’s a sideline and it’s offered as a courtesy to customers so they can keep everything at one place and they don’t have to deal with other companies to do that kind of printing, so rather than going to an artist and redoing things over and over, they just come here and, in one stop, they can get everything,” Tapper said.
The company originally was located at St. Johns Bluff Rd. and Beach Blvd., but Tapper said the traffic patterns made it difficult for customers to get in and out. Tapper’s connections led him to his current spot on Duval Street near Alltel Stadium.
“Through the grapevine, the Jaguars found out that I was looking for a place and Tom McManus, a linebacker for the Jaguars, had just gotten his commercial real estate license and he contacted me,” Tapper said. “I was the first person that he placed.”
He ’s been on Duval Street for three years and hasn’t had any crime problems.
“I love it here and I can’t see ever moving,” Tapper said. “People think that there is crime downtown, but I’ve never had anything here.”
The company has a wide range of customers, some local and some national. Besides the Jaguars, other sports customers include the Atlanta Falcons, the Suns and other minor league baseball teams like the Louisville Bats. They also work with the University of Louisville Cardinals.
“The Falcons have employees that used to work for the Jaguars,” Tapper said. “They remember you and they remember that Vivid Images does things quick and has good pricing. You have to factor in the shipping but, other than that, they know we can do it for them.”
Local restaurants which get their products from the company include Al’s Pizza, Ragtime, Sliders and A1A in St. Augustine.
“A restaurant is a restaurant. It’s not a t-shirt shop, but if you’re in Florida you have tourists, and they want a t-shirt,” Tapper said.
For that reason, Tapper’s company inventories the shirts for them and the restaurants will only pay for what they order. Some local and national companies which use their services include Honeywell, CSX, and Cox radio.
Nationally, one of their biggest customers is now located in North Carolina but used to be headquartered in Jacksonville. The company, Corporate Support System, handles Orthodontic Centers of America; Vivid Images does merchandise for the separate dentist offices over the country.
“We have no salespeople. It’s all word of mouth,“ Tapper said. “We don’t advertise. They find us and that’s the best business. Once we have a customer, we don’t lose them.”