Towel power fuels Canucks

Towel power fuels the NHL Canucks
By Dan Hilborn, Burnaby Now assistant editor
Published May 3, 2003

When the Vancouver Canucks return to GM Place for Game 5 of the NHL Western Conference semifinals on Monday, almost every one of the 18,514 fans in attendance will be carrying a little piece of Burnaby with them.
Those little white towels that are waved in the air to encourage our local hockey heroes on to victory were produced at Griffin House, a screen-printing firm located on Cariboo Road that is owned and operated by Burnaby resident Chris Morrey-Jones.
"I think the towels are a big part of the atmosphere," said the former engineer turned screen printer. "At the two playoff games I've been to, the atmosphere has been just amazing.
"When I saw those towels swinging through the air, and then heard the national anthem, it just made my goose bumps stand on end," Morrey-Jones said. "The silver lining, of course, is that my employees are all pumped up to be working with such a high visibility program. They're all hockey fans and they're all really excited about this, so it really increases our team spirit."
So far this year, the company has produced about 115,000 of the bright eight-colour towels, including a special rush order of 2,000 towels that were delivered to Gordon Campbell's fundraising dinner last week.
"This Canucks thing is keeping us hopping," Morrey-Jones said.
The company, which now has 15 employees and a 10,000-square-foot production facility and warehouse in Burnaby, actually had its start printing 'beer shirts' for local restaurants and sports bars.
But working in specialty textiles is quite a career change for a former student of Royal Roads Military College who actually started his working life as a chemical engineer for Lockheed Petroleum Services in New Westminster.
"I decided my heart wasn't in engineering, so I started importing and distributing long john shirts from California," he said.
When the company first started, Morrey-Jones actually kept his warehouse in the basement of his east Burnaby home, but he eventually moved the entire facility into a 6,000-square-foot property on the west side of Vancouver.
Over the past seven years, the firm has grown into one of the largest fast order textile printing firms in the Lower Mainland.
This spring, the company moved to Burnaby and then landed the Canucks towel contract at the same time it was working on the 50,000 T-shirts and sponsors' shorts for the Vancouver Sun Run, a double task that would not have been possible at their smaller Vancouver site.
"You don't have to be a rocket scientist to print a T-shirt, but to produce the volume with the expertise and quality that we have takes a little more management capability and having the right equipment," Morrey-Jones said.
The mainstay of the company is its large textile printing machine capable of imprinting up to 10 colours at a time on shirts, towels, shorts or any other piece of clothing. At full capacity, the machine can churn out up to 700 towels per hour.
For the Canucks towels, which also include the logos of five sponsoring companies - CKNW, The Province, Sports Action, Save On Foods and Coca-Cola - the machine is using only eight colours.
The company printed its first run of Vancouver Canucks towels in 1994 back in the heady days when young captain Trevor Linden led the team on its fabled run into Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals against the New York Rangers.
And while he's not necessarily superstitious, Morrey-Jones notes that the Canucks have won both of the playoff games that he has attended so far this year. But finding those tickets is still difficult, even for the man who makes the Canuck towels.