Sunday Print Co. with Tim Guza
Photos by J. García
It is wild to think that I have known Tim for over 10 years. We met at Culver City Skatepark and many sessions later I feel comfortable calling him my friend. I was drawn to Tim’s flawless, natural style on a skateboard, he kills it and looks great doing it. Tim is a great individual and his east coast energy is a breath of fresh air. He also runs a rad printing shop and he’s passionate about making quality products. I had the privilege of spending time at his shop while he printed some Casual Thinking shirts and we got into some great conversations.
I hope you enjoyed the conversation below as much as I did.
Casual Thinking: Sunday Print Co! How long have you been here?
Tim Guza: 13 years.
CT: How did you get into screen printing?
TG: Just an art school dropout. (laughs)
CT: For real?
TG: Yeah. I graduated from high school in 92, and I didn’t really know what to do with myself.
The typical small-town skate rat story.
I took art, printmaking, and photography in high school and thought college would be my ticket out. My art teacher didn’t really like me, and my guidance counselor messed up my college applications, so I went to the local community college for a couple of semesters, transferred to a bigger college for a while, and then ended up back at community college.
CT: Did you have a specific art major?
TG: I started as a commercial art major, which back then was a mish-mash of graphic design and all the practical applications of design. So there were design classes, but also printmaking, sign making, and photography. It was a good mix of stuff. For a moment I was an elementary education major with the intent of becoming an art teacher, but I started to realize I didn’t really like children enough to want to teach them.
CT: Valid
TG: I was just confused at that age. I was obsessed with skateboarding, and my mental health and personal life were pretty dysfunctional, so school was really difficult to focus on
CT: So what happened?
TG: I was in between semesters and I didn’t want to go back. So I decided to move to Philadelphia to just skate and get a shitty job somewhere. After living there for a year or so, I started working as a bike messenger, which turned into a decent way to make a living and a lifelong bicycle obsession and I never finished school.
A few years later, my friend was working at a print shop and the guy who owned it was an old skater, and he was doing a lot of printing for skate shops and surf shops on the East Coast. I started working there part-time and that’s where I learned a lot of what led to this.
CT: A Career
TG: Kind of. Yeah. I guess if you have to use the C word. (Laughs)
CT: Haha the C word!!
TG: But, yeah, I don’t know, everything just kind of happened by accident,
CT: How did Sunday Print Co. come about?
TG: When I moved to LA I had pretty bad luck with my first couple jobs here. I was working for people who didn’t seem to know what they were doing. During my last few years in Pennsylvania, I was working at a messenger service and a print shop, and the people I worked for were fucking awesome, so it was a tough adjustment. My last job before Sunday Print Co. was at a print shop on the west side that was owned by people who were never around, and they hired a couple of the worst dudes I ever met to run the place.
At some point, I realized I don’t need to work for these people who are doing a bad job. I can do a better job on my own.
CT: Why Sunday Print Co.?
TG: I was working six days a week, so Sunday was my day to do my own shit. I was trying to come up with an idea, like a clothing company or maybe making a skate zine. Sunday Skateboarding was the working title of my daydream project.
CT: Have you done a Zine before?
TG: I tried a few times when I was in high school and college. I just never finished one.
CT: Same, Going back to Sunday Print Co.
TG: I and my co-worker started this and couldn’t think of a name for it. It just got morphed into my other Sunday stuff and became Sunday Print Co.
CT: So how long have you had the shop?
TG: Since 2007, so going on 18 years. I’ve been in this building for 13 years.
Sometimes I feel like a crazy person by myself in this shop.
CT: Because you don’t have any employees?
TG: Yeah, but I think it’s best for me. I had a business partner and employees and that all blew up a few years ago. After that, I just wanted to work alone to see how it would go, and overall it’s been much less stressful for me.
CT: So you do it all?
TG: Yeah. It can be overwhelming at times when it’s super busy, but when it’s not I have a lot more freedom. I can also be a bit more selective about the work I do. When I had to pay other people there was a lot of pressure to take on projects that often turned into big headaches. I know that’s just part of running a business but focusing more on working with clients I like has been nice.
CT: Is having the shop fulfilling?
TG: Sure, but like anything else, sometimes it’s the best thing in the world, and sometimes it’s the fucking worst thing in the world.
CT: Earlier you mentioned skateboarding as being distracting at a certain point in your life, I also have gone back and forth on that feeling of skateboarding consuming so much of me, can you elaborate?
TG: Dude, I have a hard time communicating this because so many people our age still have such a pure love for skateboarding. Right now all the nostalgia from the time we were growing up is very popular and I’m not always down with it. I don’t want to burst people’s bubble, but it’s hard to be honest about it because sometimes I fucking resent it. It broke my brain when I was younger to the point where I couldn’t think about anything else, and I think it helped me get in my own way a few times.
CT: I know the feeling.
TG: Not that I ever wanted to take a normal path, but I felt like being that wrapped up in skateboarding you had no choice but to find some weirdo way to live your life, which I did, fortunately. Some people I know just spun out and are fucking dead now because they couldn’t figure out a way to get by because it did the same thing to them, and they didn’t have a way out. Not that it’s the only reason of course people have addiction problems and mental problems and whatever, but it doesn’t help when you’re like, obsessed with this fucking, freak activity.
CT: Ironically here we are because of skateboarding.
TG: In a lot of ways, yeah. It led to all this, because
when I was younger I was always interested in the way things got made and the way graphics got put on things, and that was such a heavy part of skateboarding, the branding and all of that shit.
It seemed like a good backup plan when I finally realized I wasn’t good enough at skateboarding.
CT: I sometimes got mad at skateboarding, but I am so grateful for it.
TG: Yeah. I’m like that with a lot of things in life. Anything I get really into turns into a love/hate relationship.
CT: Skating hurts a lot.
TG: My body is so fucking wrecked from skateboarding permanently, no matter what I do. No matter how much I ride my bike or how much kale I eat or how much fucking yoga I do, my body is permanently wrecked. Sometimes it goes away for a few days and you think you’re feeling good and then I’ll wake up some days and I just feel like I’m 80 fucking years old. It used to feel rewarding, but now I’m like what did I do to myself?
CT: Feel you! Does the shop become a creative outlet for you?
TG: It can be for sure. I work on some cool projects with people that are doing interesting stuff. A lot of it is just operating machines and doing the same thing over and over again for hours and hours and I’m on autopilot. Sometimes, it’s creative solutions to boring problems.
CT: What about Hermit Co.
TG: Hermit Co is a little side project I came up with 8 or 9 years ago when I had a business partner and employees, and I desperately wanted to be doing something on my own. I started producing some of my designs on and off when I had time or a good idea. I’ll go through a little spurt of trying to do my stuff and then I’ll get busy doing stuff for other people and just get distracted from all of the shit I was doing. I just have folders full of half-finished ideas, which from looking at your laptop, I know you know all about.
CT: Oh man. So much self-doubt, so much self-questioning.
TG: You get caught up doing the stuff you need to do and the other stuff has to get put on hold. Sometimes when you walk away from that stuff for a certain period, when you go back to it, you either rethink it completely or just realize that maybe it wasn’t that great of an idea to begin with. There’s a lot of analysis that happens in that time.
CT: I know exactly what you mean. What are some of your creative outlets?
TG: I go through phases, but I’m very bad about consistency. I like to make logos and graphics just farting around in Illustrator and Photoshop. I never had a natural drawing ability, nor had the self-discipline to practice, so I do better when sitting in front of a computer than when I’m sitting with a pen and paper.
CT: What else is keeping you occupied these days?
TG: I ride bicycles a lot when I’m not working. I rode a ton when I worked as a messenger, and a few years back I had a couple of knee injuries from skateboarding that led me back to it. I also like building and repairing them so I’m often in my garage tinkering. I still think about skateboarding all the time, and I try to get out and do it when I can. It’s fun as long as I don’t take it seriously, but it’s getting harder to bounce back from the awful slams I seem to take. I sort of need my body to work so I can make a living.
CT: Anything else you want to share that I am not asking about, you have done some foster care for Pitbull rescues right? Can you share some of that experience?
TG: Yes, you got to hang out with my little man Oatmeal at the shop the other day. He’s the newest member of our crew. I got a dog at a flea market when I was in my twenties and I didn’t know anything about dogs. She was a Pit Bull/Rottweiler mix named Veronica and she became my sidekick for many years. When I met my wife Erin and we ended up in California, Veronica made the cross country drive with me. We eventually adopted another dog from the South LA shelter, and that led to Erin doing volunteer work for a great rescue called Angel City Pit Bulls. We’ve adopted two more dogs through them and we foster dogs when we can. We’re about to take in another foster because the shelters are so overcrowded with displaced pets from the fires. We also have a grouchy cat named Jenna Maroney who just kind of showed up at our house a couple years ago. I call it The Keegan-Guza Home for Wayward Animals.
CT: Always a pleasure to chat with you. Let’s skate soon before our body fully gives out!
TG: Hell yeah pump track baby let’s go!
Learn more about Sunday Print Co. here.
