Let me kick this off by saying something I believe deep down to my core. If your shop is currently struggling to find and keep good employees right now, it is not because you are lazy, cheap, or even bad at business.
It is a fact that the ground has moved beneath our feet in the decorated apparel industry over the last four or five years.
What makes a profitable business in the industry has changed.
What our customers want has changed.
What workers want has changed too.
So, this article isn’t one I’ve written to wag a finger at you. I’m constantly speaking with shop owners and industry leaders about the state of hiring. In fact, from December of 2025 through January of 2026, I interviewed 88 industry professionals regarding how they viewed the decorated apparel and promo industries for my book “2026 Thinking.”
Looking back through the interviews, in 4 out of every 5 conversations I had, staffing was a major topic of discussion. Sometimes it was the headline. Sometimes it ran alongside topics related to the economy, AI, or even pricing. But it was consistently part of the conversations.
That tells me something. If you are struggling with staffing right now, you are not a unicorn. And that is why I need to ask you a hard question.
The market for employees changed. Have you?
Is the Hiring Crisis Actually A Hiring Crisis?
In the conversations I had then, and still have now, it seems to me that for a good number of shops the hiring problem could be a few other things.
- Leadership - is your management style driving good employees away?
- Training - are staff members getting the industry education that helps them see their position as a career vs a job?
- Systems - does the work environment cause frustration?
- Customer Mix - does your commodity-level customer base govern the decisions you make with who you can afford to pay?
- Pricing - related to your customers, does your low pricing dictate your labor budget?
- Other Tools - by using Virtual Assistants or AI, have you offloaded repetitive tasks to a less costly method, keeping valuable employees working on higher-level tasks?
Those six points might sting a little. Across those 88 discussions, and with the ones I’m still having daily, a few patterns keep emerging. What owners often describe as “I can’t find people” often turned out to mean “I never built anything to make the people here succeed once they started,” or “I chose a customer base that can’t fund a decent wage.”
Let me walk you through a few ideas that could resonate with you on this topic. You’ll probably recognize one or two of these for your current challenges. Find the one that fits you best and start working on that one today.
Who Are You Really Competing With for Labor?
You aren’t competing with the other shops in town. You are actually competing against the Gig Floor.
The Gig Floor is the market rate for your shop roles, set not by you or other shops, but by every rideshare shift, every big-box aisle, every mega-warehouse, and every fast-food counter within driving distance of your company.
Your potential future staff members are not comparing your shop to another shop in town. Instead, they are comparing your business to the easiest, least painful money they can find.
If they can make the same money running a register in the air conditioning, adding cheese to a sandwich, or taking a photo of someone’s dinner on a front-door mat after they dropped it off, why would they choose to reclaim screens, heat press a stack of shirts, or count shirts at the end of a dryer?
A few years ago, you didn’t think that you would be competing with a phone app for an employee position in your company. Who knew?
But that is the basic level worker market now. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average manufacturing hourly wage hit $36.87 in July of 2026, up 3.83% over the prior 12 months. Of course, this varies by region and job position, but have you thought about that recently?
The question isn’t “where did all the workers go?” It is this: When someone in your town weighs working for you against working in the Gig Economy, which one wins? If the honest answer you gave is “not me,” that is not a labor shortage. That is a math problem disguised as a labor problem.
“I Can’t Afford to Pay More” is a Customer Problem
I would like you to reframe this change for your shop. I hear this a lot. When you tell me you can’t afford to pay a competitive wage to keep workers, I do not hear a wage problem. I hear a customer problem instead.
Your pay rate is set by your margin. Your margin is set by who you choose to serve and what you choose to sell them. This is an on-purpose thing.
At the end of the day, your customers should fully fund the staff you need to make everything work for your business. If you are constantly chasing customers who only care about price, you can’t act surprised when there is nothing left for you to pay good people.
Your customer mix is a choice. The good news is that choices can be re-made.
You get to decide who you go after. Sometimes walking away from customers who try to grind your pricing to dust and hand you nothing but stress is the right move. Upgrading your “Ideal Customer Profile,” or ICP, can inject the revenue you need to staff your business better.
So before you tell me you can’t afford to hire, keep, or pay better people, ask the real question: can you afford the customers you currently serve?
The One Fix
One issue that I constantly hear about from business owners involves hiring, but actually seems to be a bigger problem. The employee churn cycle.
Why can’t you keep employees?
Raise your hand if this treadmill feels familiar. You hire someone. Train them up and finally get them to a good place. Then one day, poof. They ghost you and don’t come back.
What happened there? Is this the one thing you would fix first if you could only fix one thing? The frustration is real. It doesn’t exactly feel good to be hiring the same seat in your shop over and over.
Most employees leave not for financial reasons, but because of how they were managed or treated. When an employee leaves without warning, you may never know. If it seems like a constant problem, I’d look into some leadership aspects of how you are managing the team.
But also let’s look at this from a different angle. Sometimes losing a person can be the best thing to happen for your shop. It doesn’t feel that way. (And don’t get me wrong, losing your best people is always a red-hot emergency, and you should treat it like one)
How I want you to look at this is that losing people who don’t want to be there, or were holding you back, is like spring cleaning. This action clears the seat for someone hungry. It could open a promotion for another staff member who has been waiting on one. Need convincing?
I have a coaching client who has replaced every single staff member of their 35-person shop twice in three years. The other side of that gauntlet? Because he has an all-star crew, he doesn’t have to be at the office as much. He has dedicated, responsible, self-motivated employees who follow SOPs, are accountable, and deliver excellence every day.
It’s at the point now where he only comes into the office three or four days a week. Every summer, he takes a multiple-week camping trip and doesn’t even check in. That’s the level of trust and confidence he has because he solved the hiring and retention challenge.
Is Your Hiring Problem Really a Training Problem?
If you kept more employees, you probably wouldn’t need to hire as much. That’s solid logic. So, let’s look at one of the reasons why people leave. Their job.
When I say, “their job,” of course we want them to do the work. But dig in a little bit here. To them, does their job feel stagnant? Do they feel trusted? Are they being micromanaged? Is there room for advancement or promotion?
As people, we all want to be seen. We like to be acknowledged and appreciated. One of the best employee retention tools you can deploy is a cross-training program. Starting from the newest hire and working your way all the way up to your most tenured employee, everyone needs to be challenged to learn something new.
When was the last time your company thought about training as an employee retention tool? How many hours a month per employee are you spending on training per employee? What if this was a trackable KPI?
Start with your newest hire. What’s the onboarding process like in your company? I’ve heard and seen plenty of horrible and fantastic practices both on this.
The best one I’ve seen to date was a print-on-demand online store-based company that had each new employee completely handle every step of the company’s process to create and print their own employee uniform shirt. They had to use customer-facing tools to create the design and place an order on the website. Then they had to see the order in the system, purchase the shirt, queue the DTF print, process it, receive the shirt, and heat-press it. They learned the entire circuit of what they do for their customers. Regardless of their position hired, this onboarding SOP teaches both the how and why things are important.
That’s an example of the technique used to teach the general information to a new hire in their first week. They make it fun. It’s engaging and interactive. And that’s the first lesson of many to come in that shop.
So, let’s redirect this back to your business. Do you have training in place to keep new hires and current staff members on track? It’s not a secret. You have to build the guardrails that drive success. When your staff struggles, the reflex could be to somehow blame the labor market. “We just can’t find good people,” you say. Ask the better question first: what did we actually hand them to help them succeed?
After all, either way you own the result.
Are You Hiring for the Wrong Roles?
In a busy shop, not every job opening is for something in production. We have tasks that could potentially be handled by AI automation or a virtual assistant. Any sort of repetitive task that doesn’t require someone to be physically present could be handled this way.
In my conversations with other industry professional leaders, the people who see it clearly are not backfilling those low-value jobs. They are redeploying their existing people upward into roles that help scale the business. This is a more cost-effective solution. The work is still being handled, but it frees up other staff to take on more customer-facing or higher-value roles that AI or a VA can’t perform.
Let me be fair, because I think AI or VAs can be oversold. This isn’t a magic wand, and it will not fix staffing issues on your production floor or in the front office if the work needs to be performed there. AI isn’t going to reclaim a screen. A virtual assistant isn’t going to hoop a shirt in embroidery.
Think about how you can use these labor- and-money-saving methods to get the work handled, so you can hire or pay your current staff better. After all, you still have core issues in your business, customers, or team that could use some attention.
Where is the Labor Pool You Have Not Tried Yet?
Right now, there are people in your community who really want to work for you and have the potential to be in the top grade of all of your staff. In fact, only 22.7% of working-age people with disabilities are employed, compared to 65.5% of people without.
It’s people with disabilities. It is a large, loyal, and amazingly underused workforce segment that our industry always seems to forget.
I know what you are thinking. You are picturing lower output and a lot of hand-holding. It’s a common misconception.
I’m going to go into some details here, but if you want to learn more, I suggest you get a copy of a fantastic book called “INKclusivity: Company Benefits of Disability Inclusion & How-To Implementation Guide.” I had the honor and pleasure of co-authoring this book with Jed Seifert, Vince Bartozi, Tim Howe, and Patrick Bardsley.
In the book, we explore the true meaning of disability inclusion and the wide-reaching benefits it can bring to your business. We'll challenge misconceptions, shift the focus from disability to ability, and walk you through practical, step-by-step strategies. While this guide is tailored to the printing and decorating industry, its insights apply across nearly every sector. Our goal is to equip you with the tools and knowledge to build a workplace where everyone has the opportunity to contribute, succeed, and help your business thrive.
I want you to seriously consider this for your shop because, as a business owner, this isn’t a feel-good tradeoff where you have to accept weaker performance to do a nice thing. Actually, the data runs the other way. In companies that hire inclusively, 97% of HR professionals report that employees with disabilities perform as well as or better than employees without disabilities.
These employees show significantly better attendance, reliability, and retention year after year. Remember the employee churn treadmill problem? This is the opposite of that.
Here’s the takeaway I want you to learn. This is not a charity. Many of the most reliable, lowest-turnover, hardest-working employees in these shops have disabilities. You still are running your normal business. You will still hold everyone to the same standards. But when you are finally recruiting from a pool your competitors are too shortsighted to see, great things can happen.
Your Decorated Apparel Industry State of Hiring Action Checklist
Reports are useless if you just nod along while you read. Here’s a list of action items to take, from the smallest win first:
Make one phone call to a local disability employment service provider and book an assessment. It is free. It costs you a phone call.
Pull up your production wages and compare them to the real Gig Floor in your zip code, not any shops in your town. What does a rideshare app, big-box retail, or fast-food joint pay locally right now? How does that compare to what you pay?
Pick one recurring mistake in your shop and turn it into a written, one-page instruction sheet. Start there. Get your staff involved in writing it. Train your staff on the process.
Name one role or task that could be accomplished without an in-house employee. What higher-value work could the person doing it now start working on instead? What do you need to do to get started?
Spend 20 minutes this week and take an honest look at your bottom 3 customer or order types and ask whether they are the reason you can’t afford better people.
Have You Changed?
Of course, the purpose of this article is to get you thinking differently about the challenges you and other businesses in the decorated apparel industry are facing. We can’t be running our businesses as usual, as too many customer, marketplace, staffing, and technology changes are out there floating around.
It’s easy to blame the economy, people, and anything else that sounds like a plausible excuse. Much harder to accept responsibility and make the changes necessary to compete.
So, here’s the only question that matters at the end of the day, and I’m asking you straight. The industry has changed.
Where are you on these ideas? Let’s chat and discover a better future for your business.
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- Bureau of Labor Statistics, average hourly earnings and employment data: BLS Earnings Report
- U.S. Chamber of Commerce, "Understanding America's Labor Shortage": uschamber.com
- U.S. Department of Labor, Office of Disability Employment Policy: dol.gov/agencies/odep
- Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, disability employment guidance: eeoc.gov
- INKclusivity: Company Benefits of Disability Inclusion & How-To Implementation Guide, disability employment and performance research: inkclusivity.com
- Atkinson Consulting 2026 industry interview project, “2026 Thinking” (88 interviews, December 2025 through January 2026)