When husband-and-wife-team Jesica Simpson and Jeremy Lauder set out to do something, they make sure to put their all into it. And their attitude of wholeheartedness can be clearly observed in how they run their contract printing business, Derisory Designs. Jeremy started the business in college with the plan of designing and printing t-shirts, but when Jesica joined in 2005, the two realized that they could be much more successful if they focused on printing designs from customers rather than trying to print and sell their own designs.
Since Jesica and Jeremy went fulltime in 2008, Derisory Designs has expanded to print much more than just shirts. Jesica says, “We’re a contract printer so we work mainly with clothing companies, but we also do packaging, pizza boxes, bags, posters—we’re all over the place with our clientele.”
Jesica says that she and Jeremy have always pursued success in the long term. “We take out some money from our profits to pay bills, and we just put everything else back into the company.” She laughs as she adds, “You get used to living like a pauper, but the thought is that if we make all of these sacrifices now it will hopefully lead to a bigger return on our investments later.”
This approach also means that when opportunities arise that are riskier to seize now than they might be down the road, Jesica and Jeremy don’t hesitate. They recently decided to radically alter their business by purchasing an automatic press. Jesica says, “We had a client that had her own apparel company and her designs got bought by Hot Topic so she said that she would have a need for huge runs. She said that if we got an automatic press she could guarantee us the business, but to get the press we had to move locations and take out a loan. It was our first—we had never needed one before, we’d always used our own money.” They moved to a new space to accommodate their growth, took out a large loan from Finanta Microlender, and bought the equipment. The automatic press prints upwards of 700 shirts an hour, much more than the few hundred a day they managed with their manual press.
Derisory Designs took the leap, and as is often the case it lead to a different outcome than initially expected. Jesica says, “We didn’t end up getting the order we purchased the machine for, but it has still absolutely paid off. We’ve been able to do jobs we never could have done before, and we’ve opened more doors for ourselves. Now the Hot Topic business has come up again and we can be more prepared for it.” Recently, with their automatic press, Derisory Designs completed a 4000 piece order, their biggest yet.
As far as their future plans, Jesica and Jeremy will continue to focus on investing everything into their business and looking for ways to continue growing. Jesica says, “We’d like to expand into embroidery because there’s a great market for that. We’ll invest in embroidery equipment and maybe even get a second automatic press.” Visiting their workshop, it’s easy to see how Jesica and Jeremy can keep the long term in mind. Both their fathers help out with orders and their son, Seth, spends days with them on site. Jesica says, “We would really like to be able to do this for the rest of our working lives.”
Watch a video of Jesica Simpson burning a screen
Watch a video of Jeremy Lauder printing notebook covers