Campus Ink & The NIL Store take DTF on the road

What happens when you take a DTF printer, load it into an insulated 26-foot trailer, haul it to a college campus in 25-degree weather, and try to print live for fans? If you’re Steven Farag, co-founder of Campus Ink and The NIL Store (both headquartered in Chicago with a production facility in Champaign, Illinois), you call it an experiment. Then you do it again. And again.

By the time the University of Illinois made it to the NCAA Men’s Final Four this past spring, Farag and his team had turned what started as a wild idea into an NIL print operation on wheels, capable of doing 120 to 130 shirts an hour at peak output.

From concept to road

“I really wanted to test the limits of DTF and see if we could put a DTF machine in a trailer so that we could live-design and live-print for customers in the NIL space,” he said. NIL stands for name, image, and likeness, and allows college athletes to profit from their own brand.

The idea took shape through conversations with Roland DGA, a manufacturer of digital imaging technology, including wide-format and DTF printers. Daniel Valade, the company’s senior product manager, helped Farag work through power, climate, and humidity concerns before committing to the project. The printer arrived in December 2025 with Roland service technicians on site for setup and training.

The trailer, which runs about 26′ X 8′, was built over the following weeks. Farag credits his business partner Jedd Swisher, who live printed out of a converted milk truck in the 1980s and ’90s, for working alongside him night and day. To control temperature and humidity, they stripped out the walls and insulated everything, including the floors and ceiling. They added baseboard heating and a 16,000-watt generator to power the equipment.

A Roland DGA TY-300 DTF printer, a DTF dryer from DTF Station, two MEM swivel heat presses, a computer, merchandise storage, and a Starlink connection for internet were placed inside the trailer. “We’re definitely in close quarters,” Farag said.

UConn: Learning the hard way

The Campus Ink and The NIL Store team made the 16-hour drive to the University of Connecticut during the first week of February. The first activation ran for a full week, outdoors, in temperatures around 25 degrees. Farag was in the trailer by 5 a.m. most days and didn’t leave until midnight, printing apparel for both men’s and women’s basketball games.

Valade stayed in regular contact throughout, calling every other day to troubleshoot. Farag said the routine is straightforward. “The machine guides you through the startup procedures, then a quick nozzle test, and you’re good to go,” he said. “I would call the training ‘Steven proof.’ My team is way better at it than me.”

Team members set up a full merch tent, a wide range of blanks, premade designs, and the ability to live design and print with athletes on site. They also worked with Azzi Fudd, one of the biggest names in women’s college basketball, who has since gone pro, to build a merch drop and get product into fans’ hands on site.

“At UConn, we were selling like 20 designs,” Farag explained. “Way too many products, way too many variables.”

That would become one of the defining lessons of the project.

Big Ten Tournament: On-site & on demand

By the time the Big Ten Tournament came to the United Center in Chicago, the model had evolved. Campus Ink partnered with Rally House, which was running retail stores inside the arena. The trailer, parked right outside the entrance, functioned as an on-site wholesale print shop.

With multiple college basketball teams in the tournament and brackets changing daily, no one knew which would advance. Campus Ink and The NIL Store had designs and blanks ready and would print based on the results from that night to have shirts ready for the next morning’s games.

“We didn’t find out about the games until like Friday night at 10:00,” Farag said. “And we had to have the shirts ready for the morning.”

Purdue’s Braden Smith made a diving out-of-bounds play late in the tournament. Campus Ink turned it into a shirt, Smith autographed them at his hotel, and they were in the stadium for fans the next day. A catchphrase coined by broadcaster Ian Eagle, “triple Yaxle,” referencing a Michigan player, made it onto a shirt just as fast.

Saturday night, Michigan and Purdue both advanced to the finals. The team pulled together a combination design featuring both schools, licensed through the Big Ten and both universities, along with the NIL rights for the players. They got approval at 11 p.m. The shirts were in the stadium the next morning.

On Sunday, the busiest single day, the trailer produced between 800 and 1,000 pieces. The full weekend came to roughly 2,000 to 3,000 shirts. Farag said he can press about 120 to 130 pieces an hour at full pace, running for three to four hours at a time. Rally House ended the weekend with no leftover inventory and a record in sales.

“We kind of felt like we were in their backcourt that weekend,” Farag said.

NIL licensing in real time

One of the more complicated layers of this operation is the licensing. To print an athlete’s name, image, or likeness, Campus Ink and The NIL Store need rights from both the school and the player.

A week before the Big Ten Tournament, Farag still didn’t have Michigan. He reached out, made the case, and got them onboarded in time. Not every situation resolved that cleanly. There were moments where the team scrambled to the last minute to get an athlete cleared before printing.

The NIL Store focuses on athlete merchandise and is primarily an online-first business. A moment happens, the design goes live online in collaboration with the athlete, and the staff works to get it into retail at the same time. “The next day, it’s like, you saw that game winner last night. It’s at Dick’s Sporting Goods, or you can buy it online,” Farag said. The trailer compresses that timeline even more.

Final Four: Narrowing the focus

When Illinois went to the Final Four for the first time in 21 years, the trailer came home. Campus Ink’s production facility printed around the clock while the trailer went out into the community, setting up at different locations and moving as demand shifted.

“Everywhere we took the trailer, we were doing something like $10,000 to $15,000 in just a few hours,” Farag said.

They added headwear using STAHLS’ hat presses alongside the shirts, but were down to selling just one or two designs, and were moving more product than ever.

“When we niched down and narrowed our focus, we actually sold more, and it was easier to do,” Farag explained. “It’s not about giving everyone everything.”

If he went back to UConn now, he would have leaned into a couple of staple pieces and really promoted those rather than trying to do everything.

Bumps on the road

“I ran out of ink a couple of times, I ran out of powder, [and] I ran out of film,” Farag said. “I just wasn’t planning.”

Emergency runs to local distributors and overnight shipments filled the gaps. The generator browned out more than once when too many heat presses ran simultaneously. When temperatures dropped too far, the machine required the interior temp to hit a minimum threshold before starting, sending the team scrambling for space heaters.

“We recovered just fine,” he said. “But yeah, there were a couple of touch-and-go moments.”

What it means for the industry

Farag is the first to say the trailer experiment isn’t a blueprint for other print shops. “I would not recommend it,” he said. “We did this as an experiment to see if the machine would run in a trailer, and it did just fine. But it’s very, very risky.”

The takeaway for other shops isn’t to replicate the trailer. It’s to find their own version of it.

“You have to find unique ways outside of just being a commoditized T-shirt shop,” Farag advised. “You have to continue inventing and iterating, and you have to get as close to your customers as possible and bring them into the conversation. Because if not, someone else will.”

College football season is around the corner, and Campus Ink and The NIL Store have big plans. The companies have partnered with ESPN as the network’s first NIL apparel provider and will be working with College GameDay this fall.