If someone wanted to know exactly how the screen printing company Ryonet was first started, they could look no further than the company’s website for a fun and descriptive explanation.
“Ryonet was conceived in 2004 out of a punk band’s need for more tour money, birthed into the wild of the early eBay market space, and raised to its current status as a leader and innovator in the screen printing industry by an insatiable team of hard working printers, led by the fearless and spikey-haired Ryan Moor.”
Now 36 years old, Moor screen printed his first shirt in 1999 to help promote his band, not realizing that screen printing punk rock T-shirts would lead down a path that would create “amazing opportunity, supply knowledge, provide jobs and start businesses,” according to the Ryonet website.
Now, Ryonet has a total of nine locations, including the company’s headquarters in Vancouver, and locations in Portland, Los Angeles, Texas, Chicago, Florida and more. Moor credits a lot of the success of his company to the numerous mentors who have helped him along the way.
“I’ve had a lot of mentors, business people and businesses that I’ve learned a lot from,” Moor said. “I’m continuously learning, learning itself is imperative. I’ve been seeing this ad about how successful CEOs read like one book a week. I listen to audio books and those ideas just go into my mind. You don’t necessarily have one book that’s a game changer, but you develop these business ideas and strategies and culture from these hundreds of books that you read.”
Several other exciting things have been in the works for Moor, one in particular that involves making T-shirts in Haiti.
“The first thing that happened, we met this nonprofit at this trade show, and I was telling my team about it,” Moor said. “We were talking about T-shirts and how T-shirts don’t cure cancer, but they help raise money to cure cancer. That very same day, I met a guy who gives me this T-shirt and he told me, ‘We make these shirts in Haiti in order to prevent and help orphans.’”
That’s when Moor began his journey of becoming one of the founding partners of Allmade Apparel.
“The Global Orphan Project, their founder went on a mission trip to Haiti and realized that these families (in Haiti) were literally going to these orphanages to drop their kids off because they couldn’t support them,” Moor said. “So, they decided they were going to give these families jobs.”
Allmade partnered with the Global Orphan Project to produce great quality, environmentally friendly shirts while also fighting generational poverty in Haiti. The organizations tri-blend T-shirts are made from organic U.S.-grown cotton, recycled polyester and modal.
Allmade shirts are produced in a Haitian facility, Global Orphan Exchange (GOEX), where workers are paid five times the going rate for similar jobs in the area, an amount calculated to meet the basic needs of a Haitian household, according to the Allmade website. One hundred percent of GOEX’s profits are dedicated to programs that support orphans.
Since Moor already travels a lot with his Ryonet business, he was hesitant at first travel to Haiti last August to learn more about Allmade. However, he was able to go there with his wife and two oldest sons, and as a family they were able to see firsthand the daily lives of the orphans there.
“Hearing the stories of these orphans and seeing hundreds of them, and seeing the reason and solution of better work and quality wages, it was an awesome opportunity,” Moor said. “We knew this needed to happen and we started to lay the foundation.”
Four months later, Moor returned to Haiti with 25 more people to help get the Allmade dream off the ground. Moor and numerous others have made more trips since then, the most recent one occurring last month in January. He said the January trip was a huge success, and Conan O’Brien, host of the late-night show “Conan,” actually visited the Allmade factory.
“Every time we go, you’re motivated, you really want to bring the fire,” Moor said of traveling to Haiti. “It’s an incredibly powerful thing, it’s addictive. You get so much motivation and ideas to make the world a better place.”
To learn more about Ryonet, visit https://www.screenprinting.com/ or to learn more about Allmade, visit https://www.allmade.com/.
