Established in 1984 by Penny McIntyre, Think Positive Design Studio began life at a time when local textile screen-printing in Australia was booming and when everything was done by hand. She led a team of nine enthusiastic female graphic artists and textile designers, huddled around light tables, producing film positives from hand-drawn colour separations for both placement and yardage screen-printing.
Each day was a celebration of artistic collaboration with Penny quickly becoming known for her expertise in delivering concept to print. Out of this process emerged the works of now famous Australian art and fashion identities such as Jenny Kee, Linda Jackson, Ken Done, Artpark, Rodney Clark, Country Road, Reg Mombassa and Bruce Goold from Mambo.
But it was the advent of computerisation that revolutionised the company and its approach, and establishing Think Positive Design Studio as the powerhouse of Australian textile design. Penny, always sensitive to the environment, replaced her darkroom full of exposure papers and camera chemicals with the world’s first wide-format dry film digital pre-press image setter.
In the late 1990s, Penny identified an opportunity in the domestic market to develop indirect digital fabric-printing using the emerging sublimation process for the fashion industry highlighted in the opening and closing ceremonies of the Sydney 2000 Olympics.
Always a believer in using natural fabrics, in Dec 2003, Penny added to her creative art room services by investing in her own direct-to-fabric digital printing facility, so she could print cottons and silks for her discerning clients. This pioneering work in digital textiles gained much attention over the following decade throughout Australia, New Zealand and further abroad in Europe and the USA.
In response to this growing international demand, Penny, with the help of her daughter Emilie, has expanded the art room presence to the UK from where she now leads an international team of textile designers operating a 24 hour art room across the world. Together with their new printing facility in the historic Silk town of Macclesfield, they now operate a Global Centre of Excellence in Textile Design and Print offering unsurpassed service bringing stunning colour and detail to a large selection of quality fabrics.
From its humble, though exciting beginnings, a truly family business, Think Positive is renowned internationally as a leader in design and digital direct-to-fabric print technology, with its quality reproduction on cottons, linens, jacquards, lace, velvets, silks, wool, cashmere and nylon lycras.
Think textiles. Think Positive.