Not all companies pride themselves on being experts in their fields, or on keeping up with technological equipment advances and changes in technique. In fact, if more suppliers employed and trained their sales people to educate first and sell later, we would have fewer unhappy customers out there who think negatively about the supply process in general.

It all starts with the sales person. Is his goal the quick sale or the long-term relationship? Does she seek to meet her quota or to educate her customer as to what’s best to buy? It may surprise you but, more than any other single factor, education that grows into a solid foundation of knowledge is what keeps customers and repeat business. And this is nowhere more true than when it comes to purchasing an output device for digital transfers, or the transfer paper itself.

Beware the yes/yes answer

Even though many would not consider digital transfers an apt solution for high production volumes in the apparel-decorating business—and would, therefore, advocate subbing such work out to the local screen printer—17 years of experience tells me otherwise. My rule? Keep it in house and keep the profit in your pocket!

Okay, you are more than likely either a screen printer, an embroiderer, running a cutⁱ-and-sew garment plant or you are embellishing fabrics and garments in some manner. Whether it’s a thumb-print from a careless loader, a miscue on a test print, a drop of oil from your embroidery machine, or just some smudge you don’t know where came from, you are faced with fabric stains. In the process of any kind of embellishing, it can’t be helped. And stains are costly. You can’t deliver the goods with stains and, if you can’t get them out, you’ve got to replace those goods. Worse, you are facing a deadline and may not have time to replace the damaged goods.

Figure 1: The author makes the point that, when applying straight digital transfers—that is, inkjet or laser printed—versus sublimation, the requirement for polyester content or coating goes away.  -Read more-

Embroidered caps dominate the market, but screen printing offers attractive opportunities to increase sales. A headwear design with something special to attract attention motivates people to buy. That something special can be created a number of ways. The following ways are the product of the photographic process that is screen printing.

Three-dimensional printing

Three dimensional prints that have the image raised off the cap certainly are different from the norm. One layer of thick ink can be printed though a thick capillary-film stencil or the lamination of a series of films. Successive layers of additional inks can be printed over the first layer to create a wide variety of eye-popping art.

There are a lot of automatic screen-processing machines out there these days to make a pre-press manager’s job easier. Screen washing and degreasing systems, developing and reclaiming systems—sometimes it seems that the equipment manufacturers have found a way to automate just about every part of the screen-printing process.

But, as with any technology that claims to replace human effort, until an operation reaches a certain size, doing it “the old fashioned way” sometimes makes more sense than buying the latest machine. But for a growing business, it’s usually a question of when to make the change, not if.

Just a big mom-and-pop shop

The author recommends printing out RGB color palettes for reference, on every color of garment you intend to sublimate. The digital decorator who employs dye-sublimation in his or her line-up of embellishment technologies knows that the specialty shirts required for sublimation (eg: 100 percent polyester or garments with a polyester shell) are not cost comparable to the 100 percent cottonⁱ or poly/cotton blends often used in other technologies such

Many industry suppliers have gained sophistication in terms of the value of enhanced packaging, as well as a perceived value that can be all out of proportion to actual cost.

Figure 1: Not only is color-to-color registration one of your manual press’s most critical functions, but the hardware to accomplish it is under constant and repeated stress.