By SAMANTHA PONTIUS
Renee Davis is from the small town of Memphis, Texas, but she had big dreams. She moved to Lubbock and graduated Texas Tech University with a degree in Agricultural Communications and a minor in Agricultural Business. After college, she met her husband, Karson Davis, and they moved to his hometown of Littlefield.
Renee said she worked in a screen printing shop in Memphis when she was in high school. She said she really liked working there, so much so that she worked at another screen printing shop in Lubbock.
Davis said she was driving back and forth between Littlefield and Lubbock and that is when her and her husband had an idea. She said she called her former boss in Memphis and asked her how she should go about opening her own screen printing business.
“She said ‘how about I just sell you mine?’ she was ready to retire and hang out with her grandkids,” Renee said. “Karson and I bought out her and she had been outsourcing a lot of her embroidery and apparently he was ready to sell his stuff too. We ended up buying both [the screen printing and embroidery companies] at the same time, we jumped head first and just went with it.”
Sandy Sky Designs is an industrial screen printing and embroidery company, located at 125 E. Marshall Howard Blvd. Renee and Karson Davis opened the business on Nov. 1, 2021.
Renee said she was very lucky they were able to keep the clients from the previous businesses. She said that did make it harder, because they did not built up an immunity with the clients and there were some growing pains, but they are doing good now.
Davis said she was able to prepare for opening and running Sandy Sky Designs because of her past experiences working at other screen printing companies.
“In between the transition, they were training me and I worked there for two or three months, a couple of days a week to kind of just figure everything out,” she said, “Honestly, you YouTube a lot and it’s just a lot of trial and error. It’s just doing it and seeing if it works and if it doesn’t, going back to square one and starting over and trying something new.”
Davis said she has two women joining the Sandy Sky Designs team that start next week and Karson Davis helps her out a lot, too.
Davis said her favorite part of her job is being creative and seeing the tangible things that she makes everyday.
“You get to get your hands messy everyday, ink gets everywhere,” she said, with a big grin on her face. “You’re creating things. It’s so cool to see something that you’re making tangibly, like you can see what you’re making but it’s just a really cool experience. It’s a lot different than just doing like stuff on the computer and just being able to see a product is really cool. That’s probably what keeps me going.”