Marc Katz planned a new business on a green couch, handed down by his older brother. In 1999, he spent long hours on it planning a business that would let people design and buy custom T-shirts online. The couch eventually earned a place in Custom Ink’s Fairfax office. Companies collect trophies. This one kept the seating arrangement.
The furniture is a useful place to begin because Katz’s story has always involved other people: a brother with a spare couch, a father with reservations, college friends with complementary skills, and customers trying to get a group into matching shirts. The company that emerged from those relationships made its living helping other people express theirs.
Katz co-founded Custom Ink in 2000 and remained CEO until August 2024. He is now board chairman, an early-stage investor, and an adviser. Across those roles, the recurring question has been how to build something people want to join. A T-shirt turned out to be a surprisingly practical answer.
A father who liked the founder better than the idea
Katz studied physics at Harvard, graduating in 1998. He also led public-service programs through the Phillips Brooks House Association. A physics degree and a volunteer roster make an unusual preparation for selling printed cotton, but both invite the same habit: work out how the pieces fit, then make the arrangement function.
His father, Steve Katz, had co-founded three businesses in the Philadelphia area. Marc grew up seeing the work and uncertainty involved. Building a company had become something tangible, with bills and interruptions attached. The idea came with a working example, rather than a promise that everything would turn out well.
Steve doubted the T-shirt proposal and worried about price competition. He still contributed $50,000 of the initial $590,000 financing, with both agreeing he should not lead the round. Marc had support and room to run his own business. The person offering advice would remain his father, rather than become the person in charge.
It was an affectionate disagreement with money behind it. Steve could distrust the commercial premise and still trust his son. Years later, Marc’s advice to younger entrepreneurs included finding an experienced adviser they could debate with. His own example remained his father. Apparently, the right mentor need not applaud the first slide.
Three friends, one shirt, and a search box
After Harvard, Katz worked as a Wall Street financial analyst. The work suited his analytical abilities, but he wanted to build something with a more personal purpose. An opening arrived through Mike Driscoll, his former roommate, who had been experimenting with a website where customers could upload a graphic onto a shirt and buy it.
Driscoll’s prototype gave the idea a visible form. Katz brought in another Harvard friend, Dave Christensen, and they worked through how to make online design and ordering reliable. Custom Ink launched in March 2000 from a basement in McLean, Virginia. Katz slept on an air mattress to keep costs down. The accommodations were considerably less sophisticated than the ambition.
In a 2011 interview, Katz was candid about the origin: “CustomInk wasn’t even actually my idea.” He also explained that early marketing plans did not produce the traction the team wanted. Search marketing did. GoTo.com, an early pay-per-click search service, helped them reach people already looking for custom shirts. Paid and natural search became useful routes into the business.
That distinction matters to the story. A group organizer arrives with a task: shirts for a team, an event, or a gathering. Helping that person finish the task creates a reason to return. Katz associated the company’s repeat and referral business with the early team’s attention to customer satisfaction. The search box supplied an introduction; the order still had to earn the next one.
The customer gets to hold the pencil
The Design Lab put creative decisions in customers’ hands. They could add text, choose artwork, upload their own graphics, and preview a design. Professional artists reviewed orders for printing. The division of labor had a certain courtesy to it: people could make something personal without being left alone to solve every production problem.
There is a social advantage to that arrangement. A generic shirt may be perfectly wearable. A shirt carrying a shared joke or an event name belongs to a particular set of people. The customer brings the meaning. The company has to preserve it through sizing, color, placement, and delivery. A misplaced letter is a small manufacturing error with a very large audience.
Katz kept noticing the organizer behind the order. By 2015, he was discussing a group order form that allowed participants to select their own products and sizes and pay individually. It spared one volunteer the business of chasing everyone else. The feature’s name was plain, and Katz acknowledged as much. Few people volunteer to become the treasurer of twenty-seven T-shirts.
In 2007, he reported that Custom Ink was delivering about five million shirts annually. The company had also introduced CustomInk Singles, responding to customers who wanted one shirt rather than a batch. These were different needs within the same idea: give people a manageable way to make an object their own.
A little help between imagination and ink
The paintings were made by the employees
An early visit to the Tysons office found staff-made paintings on the walls, produced at a company painting party. There were action figures and a Napoleon Dynamite poster around the cubicles. Laughter escaped Katz’s office during a strategy meeting and a job interview. The office seemed comfortable making room for people’s tastes, even when those tastes required a little explanation.
The website was similarly willing to show personality. Customer reviews appeared uncensored, with the spelling mistakes and strong feelings intact. A company selling custom expression had made an interesting choice about its own public voice: let the customers speak. Compliments were more persuasive when a complaint could appear alongside them.
Katz’s concern for colleagues could get very specific. Before the move into the Fairfax headquarters, he visited workstations, sat in chairs, and adjusted furniture. The headquarters opened in 2014 with 72,000 square feet across three floors in the Mosaic development. Somewhere inside that large expansion was the very ordinary question of whether someone could sit comfortably at work.
The company’s stated values were the Golden Rule, Ownership, and Innovation. In 2016, Custom Ink placed 58th on Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For list. Such recognition concerns a whole organization. Katz had made that point when earlier attention centered on him: the business was a team effort. The office paintings supplied a less formal illustration of the same thing.
“CustomInk wasn’t even actually my idea.”
Marc Katz · 2011
More shirts, more things to get right
In November 2013, Revolution Growth invested $40 million, and Ted Leonsis joined the board. At the time, Custom Ink was approaching $200 million in annual revenue and delivering roughly 20 million shirts a year. A business that began around a prototype and a basement had acquired a very different set of operating demands.
The numbers make an appealing graph. Behind them sit less photogenic tasks: training people, reviewing artwork, coordinating production, and keeping promises on thousands of distinct orders. Custom printing has no single finished product that can satisfy everyone. Each customer brings a variation, often attached to a date that cannot conveniently move.
Katz later put the difficulty plainly: “it’s a hard business to do well.” His account emphasized the processes and technology accumulated over years. A website can take an order quickly. Making that order right requires the rest of the business to keep up.
In 2019, an investor group led by Great Hill Partners agreed to recapitalize Custom Ink. Katz remained chairman, CEO, and a major shareholder. Earlier investors were exiting their positions while management continued. The change brought another set of partners into a company whose customer proposition still depended on finishing the small details.
The shirts add up
Belonging, delivered to more than one address
As work spread across locations, Katz’s idea of a group expanded with it. Custom Ink acquired Swag.com in November 2021. Its founders, Jeremy Parker and Josh Orbach, remained to lead the business. The platform offered companies ways to choose gifts, store products, and distribute them. Team identity could arrive in separate boxes.
In January 2022, Custom Ink acquired Printfection, founded by Casey Schorr and Kevin Materi. Its software helped enterprise customers manage inventory, track merchandise, and distribute gifts around the world. The pair continued to lead their unit. Katz was assembling capabilities around a recurring practical problem: how to get a shared symbol to everyone who should receive it.
The move carried the company beyond a single group ordering a stack of shirts. A larger organization might need continuing storage, repeat distribution, and systems that connect with other tools. That is a different operational assignment, though the recipient still opens one package. Katz’s business had to work at both scales.
and CEO
CEO handoff
The founder changes seats
In July 2024, Custom Ink announced that David Doctorow would take over as CEO in August. Doctorow had led Realtor.com and previously held senior roles at eBay and Expedia. Katz stayed as chairman. After running the company from its beginnings, he was handing daily leadership to someone with experience building other digital businesses.
“Leading Custom Ink and working with such great people has been an amazing 25-year experience,” Katz said. That span included the planning that began in 1999. His statement endorsed Doctorow and described a renewed focus on the company’s digital roots. The founder was still involved, with a different job to do.
By March 2025, a public speaking-event biography described Katz as an active early-stage investor and adviser who enjoyed helping aspiring business and philanthropic leaders. The role has an obvious connection to his own beginnings. He had benefited from someone experienced enough to question an idea without taking ownership of the person proposing it.
Custom Ink’s February 2026 brand refresh, under Doctorow, emphasized the wider range of team needs its products could serve. Its catalog had grown beyond 10,000 products. The company continued to develop the commercial idea Katz had spent years articulating: the reason people order matters as much as the thing being ordered.
The green couch and the office chairs make a fitting pair of bookends. One held a young founder trying to work out what to build. The others belonged to people who would help build it. Katz’s career connects those two kinds of attention. A company begins with somebody’s idea, then asks a great many other people to make room for it in their lives.