Built by people who
actually print.

Shawn Burns is the founder of Kontraktr, the company behind Kontrol OS™ — an AI-assisted operating system built specifically for the apparel decoration, print, and promotional products industries.

For more than 25 years, Shawn has worked at the intersection of creativity, technology, manufacturing, and entrepreneurship. Beginning his career as a freelance designer at just 16 years old, he has built brands, designed products, developed websites, animated commercials, operated retail and wholesale screen printing businesses, managed print-on-demand operations, and built software to solve the problems he encountered along the way.

After graduating with honors from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), Shawn joined the renowned design collective MK12, where he spent seven years creating award-winning work for global brands including Apple, Amazon, Google, Samsung, and other Fortune 500 companies.

Over the course of his career, Shawn has worked with startups, operated production businesses, launched consumer brands, and created work for some of the world's largest companies — giving him a rare perspective that bridges creative execution, manufacturing, and business operations.

As his career evolved, one challenge became impossible to ignore: production businesses were forced to rely on disconnected software, repetitive administrative work, and manual processes that slowed growth instead of enabling it. Rather than adapting his businesses to the limitations of existing tools, Shawn set out to build the platform he always wished existed.

The result is Kontrol OS™ — an integrated AI-assisted operating system where every application works together as one connected platform. From estimating and purchasing to artwork approvals, production, fulfillment, customer communication, and intelligent automation, Kontrol OS™ is designed to simplify operations and eliminate repetitive work.

Every workflow inside Kontrol OS™ is rooted in decades of real-world experience — not assumptions. It reflects a lifetime spent designing, printing, building, coding, and solving the everyday challenges of running creative businesses, with one mission: helping the next generation of shops operate faster, smarter, and more efficiently.

Dave Christian has spent more than three decades operating one of the industry's most respected contract screen printing facilities, BUSY Screen Printing. Since the early 1990s, he's produced millions of garments for brands, agencies, decorators, and manufacturers while navigating every production challenge the apparel industry can throw at a shop.

As Kontraktr's production expert, Dave ensures every feature is built around how real shops actually operate — not how software companies assume they operate. Every workflow, automation, and production tool inside Kontrol OS™ is tested in his active production facility by a real crew, on real customer orders, before it's ever released.

Dave and Shawn first met in 2004 and quickly discovered a shared passion for screen printing, production efficiency, and building better systems for the industry they love. Their collaboration has continued ever since: Dave identifies bottlenecks and operational challenges from the production floor, Shawn transforms those insights into software, and together they rapidly iterate through real-world testing to refine every feature.

That continuous feedback loop allows Kontraktr to evolve at a pace traditional printing software simply can't match — creating tools that aren't just designed for production, but proven in production.