A marriage made of dreams, code and custom T-Shirts.

Some say you make your own luck and this story shows there is at least a kernel of truth in that, but I can’t help also feeling that sometimes you just get lucky. This is the story of how I landed my dream job at DF.

From an early stage in my FileMaker development trajectory I had identified Digital Fusion as a standard setting team to watch and learn from. It was a bitter sweet day when I found a job advertisement online for a new developer to join the DF ranks. At least they were hiring so there was hope one day, but I knew I still had too much to learn. However, perhaps my biggest hurdle  was that I was based and committed in my home on the outskirts of Brisbane , Queensland, while the nearest DF office is in Sydney.

A Brisbane based, developer,  mentor and friend of mine was aware I was looking at shifting my career into full-time FileMaker consultancy. He’d been approached about a project he couldn’t take on and put my name forward.

Enter the T-Shirts. Located near Brisbane Airport, at Eagle Farm, Queensland, QTCo or Queensland T-Shirt Company, is a leading Australian supplier of branded products for business and promotional use. They can source and brand pretty much anything and everything but also have dedicated in-house apparel and screen-printing business units. Excitingly, they also run one of the most significant ‘direct to garment’ (DTG) printing enterprises in the Southern Hemisphere.

The team at QTCo had the kind of problem you hope for in business. A significant international client, offering a large increase in sales , beyond your current system’s capacities to deliver.

The client is an international, web based, marketplace for artists. Products such as T-shirts are produced ‘on demand’ when an order is placed and shipped direct to consumers by local ‘fulfiller’ partner enterprises.  They had their eye on QTCo to be the Australasian fulfiller for printed garments, but QTCo needed to develop solutions to  integrate with the client’s automated ordering system, manage inventory and print workflow using barcode scanners and automatically create shipping labels and submit manifests to Australia Post for delivery.

I needed help with some of the web integration elements of the project so I reached out to Stuart Woodhouse and suggested Digital Fusion might work with me on it. Along the way, we discovered we work very well together. 

One day, while watching the latest bag of printed shirts getting packed and shipped from QTCo, it occurred to me there may be a way to stay in Brisbane AND work with the team at Digital Fusion all the time.  So I suggested DF may like to look at taking me on in Queensland with a view to better supporting and growing their client base here. I’m still waiting on my finder’s fee for head hunting myself, but otherwise I think this plan ticks all my boxes.