Our Story
Regal Midwest opened in St. Louis in 1994, printing and stitching for local businesses. The shop changed hands in January 2020. The equipment wasn’t much to inherit: manual registration, hand-cut film separations, software that was a decade out of date. What was actually changing hands was a customer list, built on relationships the previous owner had held for close to twenty years.
Two months later, COVID shut everything down. The entire team was laid off. The shop stayed open that year by sourcing face masks and building face shields for local companies, enough to bring people back to work, but not enough to hold onto the customer base. Nearly all of it left and never came back.
What followed wasn’t a quick recovery: two new automatic presses, a new dryer, and computer-to-screen production to replace the hand-cut film separations for good. Embroidery came in-house, then DTF, then online stores, then production software that could actually tell you where an order stood instead of losing track of it. A client base got rebuilt from almost nothing, one order at a time.
Every account today was earned after 2020, and we know exactly what it costs to lose one. Since then, we haven’t missed a single event date, whether the event was down the street or three states away.
By 2025, the business had outgrown the Regal Midwest name. It didn’t say what we did anymore, or what we’d become. Established Merch does: thirty years of experience. A partner instead of another vendor.
How the Business Grew
What started as a St. Louis screen printing shop grew into full in-house capability: screen printing, embroidery, and DTF, all under one roof, plus the online store programs that keep ongoing orders moving without a new conversation every time. Each capability was added because it solved a real problem for the people already trusting us with their orders, not because bigger is automatically better.
That’s still how growth gets decided here. Adding a service only makes sense if it means fewer vendors for our clients to manage and more of the process we can actually stand behind, not less.
The name, equipment and capabilities have changed, but the reason people stay hasn’t.
Every order still runs through our own building, on our own equipment, by our own team, so there’s one shop accountable for quality and timeline instead of a chain of subcontractors to sort through when something goes wrong. Clients still get a real person who knows their account.
We’re built for organizations that know who they are and want a partner in how they show up, the kind of relationship where nobody has to start from scratch on the next order.
That’s the part we’d never trade for scale. A bigger operation that stopped being able to make things right when something goes wrong wouldn’t actually be a better one.
How We Work
Goals
Quantities, timeline, decoration type, and artwork. A real person reviews it and builds your quote.
Proof
You see exactly what you’re getting, logo placement, colors, and all, and sign off before we move forward.
Produce
Screen printing, embroidery, and DTF all happen under our roof, by our team, not a third party.
QA
Every order goes through a quality check against your approved proof before it leaves our facility.
Delivery
If anything comes up along the way, you hear about it from us early on, not after the fact.
Follow-up
Once your order’s in hand, we check in, and your specs stay on file, so a reorder doesn’t start from scratch.
In-House Matters
Screen printing, embroidery, and DTF all happen under our own roof, by our own team. That’s different from a shop that farms out production and just manages the paperwork.
When everything happens in-house, there’s no second vendor’s schedule to wait on, no drop in quality between one shop’s standards and another’s, and no confusion about who’s responsible if something needs fixing. It’s us, start to finish.
Who You’re Working With
When you work with Established Merch, you’re working with a dedicated account team, not a rotating support queue. One person owns your account from quote to delivery, and a dedicated customer success contact follows up with you directly as your order moves through production. There’s one team accountable for your order, start to finish.