50 years Anniversary
Shirt Stop
About Shirt Stop
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Shirt Stop celebrates 50 years of business in Colorado Springs
Colorado Springs Gazette By Breeanna Jent October 7, 2025
Shirt Stop, a family- and women-owned small business providing custom screen printing, embroidery, and promotional materials services, is celebrating its 50th anniversary in Colorado Springs this year.
What began as a one-man venture initially run by founder Steve Fredrick from home for its first seven years in business — his apartment, then his home basement — Shirt Stop has grown over the last five decades into its current 10,000-square-foot shop and manufacturing studio with 16-18 employees and clients all over Colorado.
“It’s just unbelievable,” Fredrick said, reflecting on the last 50 years and how Shirt Stop has evolved.
He didn’t set out to go into the screen printing and embroidery industries when he established his business in 1975; Fredrick was working as an engineering draftsman at the time, a job he continued working even while he ran his screen printing business.
Fredrick founded Shirt Stop after he and a colleague made some customized shirts for a ski trip they took to New Mexico one weekend. Fredrick recognized a need in the local market for customizable screen printing services, he said, and Shirt Stop was born.
“Everyone wears T-shirts,” he smiled.
Eventually, when Fredrick began making more money from his business than at his job as a draftsman, he decided to focus full-time on Shirt Stop.
Over the years, he hired staff and moved the business into rented buildings near the area of Platte Avenue and Circle Drive. In 2000, he built Shirt Stop’s current home, a 15,000-square-foot brick building at 875 Ford St., between Galley Road and East Platte Avenue/U.S. 24 on Colorado Springs’ far east side.
Shirt Stop occupies 10,000 square feet of the building, where it has a retail shop, printing press, and embroidery room, and rents the remaining 5,000 square feet of commercial space.
Families, youth and adult sports teams, community organizations, schools, and professional Colorado sports teams, the Denver Broncos, Denver Nuggets, Colorado Avalanche, and Colorado Rapids are among Shirt Stop’s numerous and varied clientele. And there’s no job too big or too small for the business, Fredrick and its co-owners Michelle Davenport and Linda Williams said.
They customize clothing from T-shirts to ball caps to jackets and more, and provide promotional materials such as tote bags, lip balms, koozies, and others. Clients can provide their own items for customization or can purchase them directly from Shirt Stop.
The items are customized on presses in-house, which allows Shirt Stop to complete hundreds of screen printing jobs each hour. An embroidery room set up with rows of automated sewing machines can complete hundreds of stitches a minute, Fredrick said.
He sold the business in 2019 to Davenport and Williams, two long-term employees. Fredrick and his late wife, Lura, had previously talked about selling the business before she died unexpectedly in 2017; it was important to them both that the business stay local, Fredrick said.
Even in the age of the internet, where people can custom-order most anything overnight, Shirt Stop stands out from the crowd because of the personal touch it provides customers, Williams said.
“In today’s market, when ordering over the internet, you don’t get the in-person, face-to-face experience. Your local people are important; (clients) can walk in and see, ‘Oh, yes, they do have a brick and mortar building. They do production on-site,” she said. “It’s important to buy local and keep your local people.”
There’s also a sense of accomplishment when Shirt Stop employees spot people out in public who are wearing a T-shirt, hoodie, ballcap, or other item that their business customized.
“I love going to the grocery store and seeing a shirt that we did. … It’s really special to be a part of that,” Davenport said.
She and Fredrick recalled a favorite saying of Lura’s: “Every shirt tells a story.”
“Whether it be a family reunion, whether it be a motorcycle club, whether it be the Avalanche or the Broncos, it’s always neat to see that story,” Fredrick said. “It’s neat to see when people post a Facebook picture of the group, and it’s neat to see people take the shirts for their company, and they go in their car, take off their old T-shirt, and put the brand new one on. It’s just like, how sweet is that?"
