Live event printing in Portland.
Keep it weird.
Portland respects anything made by hand in front of you, so our live printing crew brings the whole shop: DTF stations, a hat bar, embroidery and a screen press, set up at convention booths, brewery events and brand pop-ups across the metro.
This is the town of small-batch coffee, hand-bound zines and food carts with cult followings, where how a thing gets made is half of why people want it. A live print line fits right in. Put one at an eastside expo booth, a taproom takeover or a west-side tech campus party and people drift over to watch. Guests choose a design, see it printed and leave wearing something that didn't exist a couple of minutes earlier.
How it works
The path from inquiry
to wet ink, in four
Describe the event
Date, venue, headcount. For an Oregon Convention Center show, add your booth size and the move-in dates.
We prep the art
We proof each design and lock it about a week out, so screens and transfers are made in Fullerton before the freight leaves.
We build the station
The kit rides freight up I-5 from Fullerton and the crew flies in to build and test before your doors open.
Printing begins
Each guest chooses a design and a size, and about two minutes later they're wearing it.
Live stations
Live stations built for
Portland events
Every live event printing setup we send north is some mix of five stations, from live screen printing in Portland to DTF, caps and stitching. Rain decides a lot of it.
Live Screen Printing
One design pulled by hand, the quickest way to put a logo on a few hundred shirts at an eastside expo.
ExploreLive DTF Printing
Full-color art, and a different name on each piece if you want it.
ExploreLive Hat Bar
Caps and beanies with a patch pressed on while guests wait. Good gear for a drizzly day.
ExploreLive Embroidery
Stitched logos and monograms for a Pearl District dinner or a client gift. Slower, and it shows.
ExplorePromo & Hard Goods
Totes and tumblers for people with plenty of shirts already.
ExploreOccasions
The events Portland
brings us in for
Why live
Anyone can order merch.
Yours gets made live.
A box of pre-printed tees gets carried out of the convention center and forgotten in a hotel room. A hoodie a guest watched come off the press, in the size they asked for, goes on right there before they step back out into the drizzle. People keep what they saw made.
Plan your Portland activationAcross Portland
We print where
Portland gathers
Eastside expo halls, Pearl District galleries, Hawthorne storefronts, Beaverton and Hillsboro campuses, even across the bridge to Vancouver. Once the kit is in town the whole metro is a drive away, and a covered station keeps printing through the drizzle.
- Oregon Convention Center
- Moda Center
- Veterans Memorial Coliseum
- Portland Expo Center
- Revolution Hall
- Providence Park
Questions
Sorted before you ask
Most Portland events land between $5K and $15K all-in. Headcount, print hours, the garments and the number of stations set the figure. Freight and flights for the trip (843 miles as the crow flies) sit on one flat travel line, and the itemized quote comes back within 24 hours.
A press does roughly 60 an hour, and our standard station has two presses and two printers, so a steady line gets 100+ an hour. Each guest waits about two minutes from picking a design to wearing it. Here's how to plan live printing pace for a Portland crowd.
A 10×10 ft spot per station and two dedicated 120V/20A circuits. We bring the presses, ink, blanks, tables and crew. At the Oregon Convention Center the power is ordered through the venue. Outdoors, we also need a covered spot with sidewalls, because rain is part of the plan here.
Six to eight weeks for most Portland dates. The gear ships freight from Fullerton, 843 straight-line miles away, and the crew flies in, so the freight schedule sets the clock. Art locks about a week out. A closer date can still work with simple art and standard blanks, so ask.
No. Live t-shirt printing is where most Portland setups start, but beside the press we also run live DTF, a build-your-own hat bar, on-site embroidery and hard goods like totes and drinkware. On a cold outdoor day, a hoodie, a beanie or a cap usually beats a thin tee.
Yes. The full metro is covered, from Downtown and the eastside out to Beaverton, Hillsboro, Gresham, and Vancouver across the river. We are based in Fullerton, CA, and travel plus lodging are already rolled into the single number on your quote.
Yes. An Oregon Convention Center booth suits a live press well: we build the station into your booth plan, order power through the venue, load in on the show's marshalling schedule and print shirts, hats and totes for attendees on the floor.
Everything it takes: the crew, presses and dryers, XS to 4XL blanks, freight and travel, setup and teardown, and every piece printed during the event, on one itemized quote with nothing added later.
Every scale of room works. The mobile crew fits venues from the Oregon Convention Center, Moda Center, Providence Park and the Veterans Memorial Coliseum down to brewery taprooms, hotel ballrooms and private lofts, printing apparel, hats and merch live at conventions, corporate events, festivals and activations across the Pearl District, Downtown and Old Town. Waterfront stages and summer concerts have their own page: live printing for Portland festivals. Conferences and company kickoffs have theirs too: live printing for Portland corporate events.
Merch Troop overview
Get a look at the setup before booking it.
A two-minute look at the presses, the hat bar and the crew. This is the kit that gets crated in Fullerton and trucked north for a Portland date.
Start your Portland quote
Tell us about
your Portland event
Expo booth, taproom party, campus celebration: sketch out the date, venue and headcount, and we'll spec the station lineup and send an itemized Portland quote within 24 hours.
- A line-by-line quote inside 24 hours
- Gear trucked up from Fullerton before your load-in
- Metro-wide coverage on one flat quote, with crew, equipment, travel and lodging all inside the number