Founded in 2014 with a mission to combine top quality production with outstanding customer service.

We treat your resources—time, money and effort—as if they were our own.

Come in to the shop at the end of a busy day and you might catch us finishing up our staff meeting over a couple of beers. Our secret is that we’re a bunch of people who just like screen-printing and hanging out so we found a way to make that into a business. And if you take a closer look: everything at Floodway has its place and process because we know that seconds make a difference to our clients, and many of those clients are actually our neighbours.

“I’m learning about island mentality, and how in Japan, there are millions of people but you’re on an island, so you’ll see those people again,” Production manager Cory Beal said. “Here in Winnipeg, we’re on a little bit of an island.

“I wouldn’t be opposed to being a national print shop, but Floodway at our core is definitely printing for our neighbours. Even when we work for larger accounts, we would still treat it the same. Quality comes from accountability. Plus, if something is a little bit wrong with the order, shipping it back and forth kills it.”

We have fun but we also take pride in our work. Every ink container has its place. Weird technical flukes are documented as learning material for later. Each machine and station is outfitted with a laminated instruction guide. It’s all so that virtually anybody could walk in and start printing to the exact standards that they have set out.

“It’s about setting a standard and keeping the rope tight and not having it come down to me, because I’m a human, and I have my own different incentives,” Beal said. “It should come down to what’s best for customers and not basing it on human crap, cause we’re all bad at it.”

Making fewer mistakes and happy clients help our bottom line, but it’s not just about the money for us at Floodway. It’s about helping our clients look great and achieve their goals. A lifelong BMX rider, Beal was introduced to the industry when he came to a screen-printing shop to get some t-shirts printed for a BMX event. He wasn’t totally sold on the process as a customer and realized he could do it better.

Today, clients include businesses, brands and bands of all kinds, and some of them are literally trying to cure cancer. Some are on their last bit of money trying to get some merchandise printed, so again, respecting those resources is integral to every step of the process. But whether you’re into BMX, curing cancer or installing pipes, it’s all the same thing to Floodway:

“They’re building a dream. If we treat anybody differently, it affects everybody.”

Floodway provides a service more than anything else—we have the same access to garments and ink that anybody else does, so our area of mastery is in the printing process itself, which we have down to a science. We recently started selling some of our own merch too, which you can find in our shop on the fourth floor of 290 McDermot Avenue, an old warehouse building in the Exchange District.

The location may actually be helping us channel some garment wisdom, according to Beal. The space has creaky wood floors and 13’ ceilings supported by thick wooden beams.

“These buildings have been used for garment manufacturing since the Panama Canal opened, textiles and denim, that’s what this has been most of its life,” he said. “There is an energy here and it feels cool to be here doing this. We have a jar of pins we find on the floor from all the past businesses that have been here.”

As an entrepreneur, Beal says he gets to make the rules and see if they make sense or not. But one has stuck from day one:

“Don’t work for assholes, don’t work with assholes.”

It’s both a philosophy of the shop and a well-displayed sign next to the coloured inks. We know you’re ordering with us because we’re going to treat your project with the care and attention it deserves. We also know that our business is built on doing work for the people down the street, and that’s why you come first.