Started by a military family.
Proven the hard way.

Mabuhay Designs & Co didn’t start in a storefront. It started at home, five miles from the Camp Lejeune gates — a military family, a starter printer, a heat press, and a belief that the gear our community wears should actually survive the way our community wears it. We’d lived that life: PT at dawn, the field, the endless wash rotation. We knew exactly what kills a printed shirt, because we’d worn the ones that died.

So before we sold a single shirt, we turned our home setup into a test bench. For months we tested every ink we could buy, every DTF powder, every film, every blank worth pressing — running them against each other in every combination, down to viscosity-testing the inks themselves. Most of it failed us. That was the point.

Then we got destructive on purpose. Every DTF print ships with care instructions — wash cold, no high heat, don’t iron the print. We did all of it anyway, to our own samples, hunting for the crack, the peel, the fade. If a combination survived what the instructions say never to do, it could survive a barracks laundry room. The combinations that made it became our standard. The rest never touched a customer.

Out of all that testing came a pressing process we still run on every garment today — eight steps, tuned to each fabric, where most shops press once and ship. It’s slower. It’s also the reason our prints come out more durable and softer at the same time, and why we’ll put our shirts against anyone’s.

The starter rig is long gone — we outgrew it and reinvested in a commercial dual-head DTF printer and shop-grade presses, all run in-house in Jacksonville. The care never changed; it just scaled. Today the same process runs full company orders for units across Camp Lejeune and MCAS New River — course classes, homecoming runs, whole battalions — as a disabled veteran–owned shop and a registered vendor on SAM.gov.