From the St. Louis Park Magazine, February 2014:
From one unassuming building on Gorham Avenue, creativity overflows. It’s the home of Chux, a design and screen printing company that’s been churning out T-shirts, posters, brand graphics, illustrations and more since 2005—right here in St. Louis Park. Chuck Souvignier is the founder and owner. “I had a friend in high school, and her parents owned a print shop,” he says. “I worked there through high school, got a degree in advertising and had the moment when I realized I wasn’t meant to sit at a desk for the rest of my life.”
Souvignier went back to work at his family friends’ print shop in Maple Grove and eventually decided to forge ahead with his own business. Almost 10 years later, Chux has a loyal legion of clients—from local breweries to radio stations—and a handful of employees. “We have a couple of people dedicated to printing full time,” Souvignier says, “a couple of designers, and a couple of us who float everywhere.”
The core of the business, says Souvignier, is the craft of printing. “Not much has changed for screen printing over the years. We have manual presses and automatic presses. We put down negatives and burn films on the screens,” he says. (Visit www.chuxprint.com for a fun video on screen printing 101).
Souvignier and his team work with a wide variety of small businesses and individuals with different printing needs, but they’ve discovered a growing demand from the local beer scene. “We have some clients [who are brewers], and they’ve been great to us. They refer us on to other brewers, and that whole scene is growing,” says Souvignier, adding that clients include Steel Toe Brewing in St. Louis Park and Excelsior Brewing Co. in Excelsior as well as Surly and Fulton brewing companies.
“They’re pretty creative people themselves, so they allow us to have a longer leash with what we can do for them.”
Chux is located at 3316 Gorham Ave.
Chuck Souvignier works on a Fulton screenprint.