Eric Solomon She did. It was very, very exciting. I think it is very well well-deserved.
I know she was very honored to receive that along with, I think it was four or five other women that are also in our industry, all very deserving of it as well. And I think it was cool that they're starting to make changes and recognize, you know, different people in this industry. Because as you know, Marshall, there are so many different facets of what we do, and there are so many different types of people and personalities in this business that it's exciting to see. See them kind of foster that in different areas. Maybe they haven't before. Marshall Atkinson Let's go back to the beginning, Eric. So tell us the origin story about Night Owls and how has your business and skillset evolved? Cause that's what we're talking about today -- growth. Eric Solomon So our story with Night Owls is I feel, you know, probably not different from a lot of other companies that you may have talked to or you may have heard from over the past couple of years. My wife and I, we started this business together -- Matt Ellis started in 2010, but we had been printing since 2004. We started in my bedroom at my parents' house in North Houston. I was in a band, I was making one-inch pin back buttons for my band, for my friends' bands, and we slowly decided that we were going to start printing t-shirts and we started by going to, I think it was Hobby Lobby and just getting a Speedball Kit. And you know, finding old coloring books that we liked and sort of “borrowing”, the images from the coloring books, just because they were black and white. And, we spent a lot of time messing up. At one point in time I tried to wash plastisol ink out in my parents' kitchen sink. They were not very excited about that. And, yeah, we just sort of, I kept going and going and going. I think we took a screen printing class at a local like community space here... was teaching us how to print with Speedball Water-based Ink and kept getting frustrated and kept trying to go back and learn more and more. And that's sort of our career, I think like in a very brief synopsis of just like, get frustrated, go back and try it again until we can figure out how to make it work. Marshall Atkinson Well, an interesting thing here is I just finished Seth Godin's new book "The Practice". If you haven't read it, you should. And in that book, he talks about what he calls desirable difficulty, which is the notion that we set challenges that are beyond our grasp in front of us to intentionally learn. And once we master that, then there's the next thing. So we're always looking at leveling up, and I think, you know, you starting the way that you have is proof -- because you're such an awesome printer, that you've constantly set these little challenges up in front of yourself to knock them down, right? Wouldn't you agree with that?
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