Dynamic Designs turns shirts to dollars

Jennifer Ditlevson Haglund
After joking with her brothers about starting her own business, Julie Dack, Ravenwood, took the plunge last May and founded a koozie and T-shirt screen-printing company named Dynamic Designs, which has grown to the point that it has taken over her garage. Dack set up shop at Saturday’s Health and Fitness Fair where she sold shirts bearing fitness-oriented sayings and slogans.

It started as a joke among siblings. Whenever Julie Dack and her brothers saw a beer koozie, they would say they should start their own company because they knew they could do it better.

So when Dack quit her office job a while back, she thought it might be time to turn the idea into more than a joke.

After deciding to start her own business designing and printing T-shirts and koozies, she began to do some homework.

Dack said she had no background in screen-printing or embroidery but soon found people in the industry willing to help her get started.

“I know some people in the business, and they led me in the right direction,” Dack said. “Still, there was a lot of trial and error with learning about all the inks and emulsions.”

Since she began in Dynamic Designs in the spring of 2015, Dack has printed shirts and koozies for dance academies, workplaces, and benefits.

“We took a small, funny thing we’ve been talking about for years, and we did it,” Dack said.

On Saturday, Dack had a booth at the ninth annual Health and Fitness Fair at the Maryville Community Center.

Shirts and racerback tank tops with sayings like “Killin’ It” and “Beast Mode” lay on the table for sale, and Dack brought a heat press with her so she could print on request during the event.

Since it was a health fair, most customers were going for fitness slogans, and Dack pledged to donate $1 to the Organ Donor Foundation for every shirt sold.

And therein lies quite a story.

While Dack was playing mud volleyball at Mozingo Lake last year, she got some mud trapped in one of her eyes. That led to complete vision loss in the eye due to a bacterial infection that destroyed the cornea.

Last month, she had a cornea transplant, and so far everything is going well. Her body has not rejected the transplant, and the experience has given her a personal appreciation for organ donors. Without a donor cornea, there would be no chance of restoring her vision.

A shirt sloganc posted on her Facebook page reads: “Of course I’m an organ donor, who wouldn’t want a piece of this?”

Participating in the health fair over the weekend was one of her first gigs after recovering from the surgery.

On other fronts, Dack said starting her own business has given her the flexibility to be more active in her sons’ extracurricular activities.

“My husband is very happy about it because I’ve talked about it for years, and he likes the fact that I’m at home,” she said.

Dack has yet to buy advertising for her business or set up a website, but she said both steps are on her to-do list, and that she wants Dynamic Designs to grow.

“There is more equipment I’d like to get to make things easier, because right now it takes me more time,” she said.

Her current setup means she can only imprint shirts and other items in fairly small quantities.

Dack said she is open to all kinds of screen-printing jobs. Sometimes she design shirts herself, and other times clients submit their own ideas.

It’s a lot of work, but Dack is getting assistance from her brothers Jesse and Jerry Godsey, who helped come up with the idea for the business in the first place.

According to Dack, the entrepreneurial siblings enjoy lending one another a hand.

Jesse owns the Back 40 BBQ food truck, which opened for business last year.

“We’re very family oriented like that,” Dack said. “If I’m not making shirts, I could be stirring barbecue.”