08/25/2026
Behind The Bricks: Fearless Ink ⚡👕
There’s a lot happening behind Fearless Ink, a custom apparel and printing business in Downtown Kearney, that most people never see.
We spent some time walking through the shop with owners Mandy & Holly to see what actually goes into the shirts, hats, and other apparel that eventually leave the building.
⚾ The 'Fearless' part goes beyond the print shop
• Holly and Mandy both have long backgrounds in softball as players and coaches. The name Fearless grew from the same message they used with girls they coached: play fearlessly, be independent, and be yourself.
• Fearless Ink sponsors youth softball teams, providing uniforms and other apparel to help keep the cost of playing lower for families. Holly and Mandy remember how cost can affect a kid’s opportunity to play, making affordability important to them.
• Their involvement goes beyond putting their name on a team. They also hold coaches meetings, organize team activities, and share their own coaching experience.
• Holly’s son Trystan is part of the day-to-day too. He helps sort & organize shirts, take out the trash, and has pretty much claimed the upstairs space as his own lair.
🖨️ There’s a lot of prep before a shirt gets printed
• Screen printing uses mesh frames that work like stencils for ink. Each color in a design can need its own separate frame.
• Preparing them involves coating, exposing the design, washing, drying, lining everything up, and testing it before printing starts. The coating is also light-sensitive, which is why Fearless Ink has a small dark-room area in the back.
• Taking a used frame and getting it ready for another job can take roughly two hours once all the cleaning and drying is factored in.
❎ Mistakes still have a job around the shop
• Shirts with holes, stains, or printing mistakes can become test shirts, getting covered with more and more practice prints before an actual customer order is printed.
• Once there’s little room left, they’re cut up and reused as cleaning rags, getting one more useful life out of apparel that otherwise couldn’t be sold.
🧵 The embroidery side has its own personality
• Their two embroidery machines are named 'Kenny' and 'Dolly', after Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton. The names also help Mandy keep track of which machine is running which design.
• Hats have to be designed upside down on-screen because of how they sit in the embroidery machine. Forget to flip the design first, and you'd get an upside-down result.
• Mandy is still learning some of what the machines can do, including advanced techniques they haven’t had time to fully bring in-house yet.
👐 A lot of the printing is hands-on
• Holly handles most of the screen printing on a six-color manual press, meaning each shirt is loaded and worked through the printing process by hand.
• Mandy handles much of the embroidery, computer work, online stores, and other parts of the operation.
• When bigger orders come through, both sides of the shop get involved in printing. One fall-sports order they mentioned included 282 different items.
🏢 Growing the operation isn’t as simple as buying a bigger machine
• An automatic screen-printing press is a future goal, but they estimate the full upgrade could be close to $100,000 once the machine, electrical work, air compressor, and other changes are included.
• Then there’s the very downtown-Kearney-building problem of getting the machine inside. They’ve realized the existing doors may not be large enough, which could mean windows or other parts of the storefront would have to be temporarily removed.
🐶 And Moose pretty much runs the place
• Moose, Fearless Ink’s 8-pound Morkie-poo and unofficial shop mascot, wanders through the workspace, hides treats in boxes and blankets, and apparently has some strong opinions about brooms and vacuums.
Holly and Mandy didn’t start Fearless Ink already knowing how to do all of this. They’ve learned through research, help from other local printers, trial & error, and a lot of figuring things out as they go.
Learn more or start your order with Fearless Ink here: https://fearlessinkcustomapparel.com/
That’s the side of Downtown Kearney we want to show more of with Behind The Bricks: the work, spaces, people, quirks, and little details you normally don’t get to see from the sidewalk.
