South Korea’s Vaileys Installs Kornit Atlas

The company transformed from analogue to digital to meet increasing demands for high quality prints in variable small volumes.

Vaileys is a South Korean company that once specialised with analogue mass production textile printing. Some of its clients include major Korean brands such as LG and Samsung. Due to their customers’ increasing demand for small volumes with various designs, Vaileys had to change their analogue system to digital.

“As the market changes, our main clients such as LG Fashion, Samsung Fashion, The Handsome – those domestic brands have higher requirements for the printing results. But the existing analogue printing methods have limitations. In order to meet clients’ needs, we looked for a new solution and finally selected digital printing,” said Lee Hyo Joo of Vaileys.

In June 2019, Vaileys installed industrial digital textile printer, Kornit Atlas. The Kornit Atlas is a heavy-duty system designed to deliver a typical annual production capacity of up to 350,000 impressions, optimizing production efficiency and cost of ownership. The Kornit Atlas is aimed at highly productive garment decorators, mid to large size screen printers and innovative businesses looking to combine stateof-the-art technology with lowest cost of ownership.

“We chose Kornit because it simplified our production process; it's very fast and efficient. After buying and using Kornit’s system, the previously complex production process ended with only 1 or 2 steps, and labour cost is also largely saved. Kornit printer can provide the best printing quality, allowing us to adapt to market changes and meet market needs,” said Lee.

The Kornit Atlas is equipped with a unique printing engine, featuring an enhanced version of Kornit’s HD technology, complemented by a

professional RIP software solution, and produces prints that meet the highest standards of retail quality and durability.

Lee explained why being able to deliver high quality variable prints is a particularly important feature for the company: “Nowadays, the market welcomes products with multiple designs, styles, colours with high resolution. End-customers have various requirements and high taste, and we are using Kornit printers to meet these market trends and customers’ high requirements. We will continue work hard on maximizing Kornit’s advantages and providing high quality products to our markets.”

The existing analogue technologies had its limitations. Particularly, printing multiple colours caused the print quality to decrease considerably.

South Korea’s Vaileys Installs Kornit Atlas

Mr Lee Hyo Joo from Vaileys

“In terms of printing quality, the existing analogue printing is weak at producing multi-colours and the resolution decreased significantly when printing high resolution images like photos or artwork. As a result of the low print resolution, customers often complained.,” Lee explained. prints. It provides an industry-leading white ink opacity, matched to those of conventional screen inks, and meets highest durability standards on multiple fabric types. Its increased colour gamut and saturation allow for deep full tones and precise spot colour matching.

“Kornit is very good at presenting multiple colours. With Kornit’s system, multiple colours can be vividly presented, 100%, with high resolution. End-customers are very pleased with the printing results; our clients are also very happy with that, and orders are increased,” Lee continued.

Compared to analogue technologies, digital printing is considerably kinder to the environment. By investing in the Kornit Atlas, Vaileys is able to switch to a water-free printing system that does away with external processes such as pretreatment, steaming and washing. The NeoPigment Eco-Rapid has been developed with sustainability in mind, carries the Oeko-Tex EcoPassport certification and is GOTS pre-approved.

“Analogue printing has serious water pollution problems as well. Using Kornit, we don’t need to worry about the water pollution problems at all. We can now produce high-quality products in a pleasant working environment,” he concluded.

The Atlas comes ready for Kornit’s future releases of its cloud-based business intelligence, productivity analytics and optimization software platforms. It will allow for easy future network connectivity required to support fleet management and optimization of global multi-systems and multi-site enterprises.

“We are delighted to have partnered with Vaileys to have this important breakthrough with Atlas in Korea. At Kornit, we believe passionately that Atlas delivers the true crossover between screen and digital and we’re really happy that Vaileys are seeing the benefits of investing in what is truly the world’s most efficient DTG (direct to garment) printer. As the industry hits an inflection point post-COVID-19, we believe that more and more customers across Asia Pacific will be looking to make the kind of switch that Vaileys have, and make the positive move into digital,” said Andy Yarrow, president of Kornit Digital Asia Pacific.