Today we’d like to introduce you to Kat & Tom Vaughan-Johnson.
Hi Kat & Tom, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Back in 2013, we started a collaborative art project together, using Tom’s illustration and Kat’s photography. We called this project Split Arrow. While producing prints and pieces, we would always get asked who printed our artwork and the answer was that we would print our own. We developed a strong relationship with print using multiple print techniques and how to consistently achieve high-quality work that had an authentic “original” feel. Over time and talking with other artists, we had found there was a large gap in the accessibility of print and a lack of information on how to make your artwork a successful print. We also noticed many other artists would order from random websites and there was no real answer to where they got their work made, just “somewhere online”.
Noticing these problems, we decided to pivot our small artist’s shop to a print house, reusing the name we built. We launched Split Arrow Print House in 2015. Our main goals were to be a printer that made printing easy, accessible, and fun while cultivating a community of artists that when asked “where do you get your prints” proudly say “Split Arrow Print House.” Flash forward to almost seven years later, we are creating prints and products for incredible artists, makers and small businesses.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Like any small business, there are always struggles along the way and struggles that will come up in the future as the business grows. Our solution since the beginning has been to look at each issue and analyze why it’s happening so we can build systems to alleviate each issue. We have built our shop to be flexible and receptive to new systems and custom automations to make sure we remain consistent in our products while improving internal mechanisms.
One of our biggest struggles in the beginning was volume of print orders. We noticed early that one of the bottlenecks were taking orders with an ‘email for a quote’ system that a large majority of other printshop use. Our solution was to migrate our entire shop to an e-commerce platform. Doing so meant tons of work in spreadsheets, photography, and potentially having our main website down for days as we migrated everything over. This turned out to be one of the best things we did to make our shop super easy to navigate and keep stock of the most asked for print products. Another production bottleneck we came across was that we were using too much of our time on small tasks that didn’t need to have that much human intervention. These tasks, like laying multiple copies on the print area, hand cutting all prints, and manually placing all crop marks, took hours away from our weeks. These small tasks didn’t need people and we decided to make and test custom automations that we build around the workflow we had for years. These automations allowed us to free up over half of our time, giving us the opportunity to work on new products, customer outreach, and even push our shop into new printmaking process.
As you know, we’re big fans of Split Arrow Print House. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
Split Arrow Print House is a two person shop specializing in print services for creatives, artists and businesses. We are best known for our high-end archival artwork printing that not only provides rich accurate color but also a selection of curated papers in a variety of textures. We also provide promotional and merchandise printing that includes stickers, buttons, flyers, business cards, banners, and soon to offer to the public Risograph zines and prints.
We set ourselves apart by being flexible in how we operate remaining open to future changes, offerings, and features. One of the biggest things we are currently working on is a large collection of educational content in the form of zines, blog posts, and videos that teach people not only how to send files to print but how to figure out how to increase their products value to personally earn more in their art career. We have built up many years of knowledge from printing, being artists, running a business, and seeing tons and tons of prints that come through. We learned what does well and what needs work and we look forward share this info to other artists.
As a shop, we are super excited about our next phase and what we are currently make happen. We are working towards expanding our print offers and also trying to find ways we can minimize shop waste and turn that back around to reduce our environmental impact, as it is not often something a printer can fully manage. We are currently recycling our cutting scraps into printed sample books, paper feel guides, and soon handmade artist papers and sketchbooks.
We, as a shop, are proud we have built a community that believes in our company vision of what print can be and that they can expect the same quality an artist would produce for themselves from Split Arrow.
What do you like and dislike about the city?
Atlanta is a wonderfully diverse city, with all kinds of amazing residents and communities. We love to see how many artists, creatives, and local businesses have built, grown, and thrived over our 10+ years being Atlanta residents. Unfortunately, the city has severe infrastructure issues which has created problems in lack of accessibility as far as walkability and public transit goes. Atlanta is very car centric which limits people to the neighborhoods where they reside and don’t get to enjoy all of what Atlanta has to offer. There is an improper distribution of funding so things like the roads, sidewalks, and MARTA all are shorted and are barely functional as is. Overall, we love Atlanta and hope to see real change within the city so that its lifetime residents, new residents, and tourists can all enjoy this city together.
Contact Info:
- Email: splitarrowprints@gmail.com
- Website: splitarrowprints.com
- Instagram: splitarrowprints
- Other: Tik Tok @splitarrowprints
Image Credits
Photos by Kat Vaughan-Johnson and Tom Vaughan-Johnson
