33 minute read
Essential Services in a Time of Crisispply
ESSENTIAL SERVICES IN A TIME OF CRISIS
It’s been common to see frequent references and riffs on the title of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel “Love in the Time of Cholera,” but in this day of quarantining and social distancing, the Marquez title that springs to mind for many of us is “One Hundred Years of Solitude”—but not for sign companies.
On our special online COVID19 coverage page, we have been tracking what businesses across
the industry have been doing to help battle, or at least cope with, the crisis. We are also conducting a short survey to update our “Printing Outlook 2020” report as obviously our outlook for the year has, um, changed since December when we wrote the report.
In this, the first of what I plan to make a series of periodic “check in” articles, I take a look at how the crisis has impacted businesses in the wide-format and signage market.
“We’re very fortunate that we have a good amount of work with businesses and industries that fall into the ‘essential’ classification, mainly healthcare and construction,” said Rick Bult, owner of FASTSIGNS of Saratoga Springs, N.Y. “Even though restaurants are considered essential, the amount of work they generate for takeout and pickup isn’t enough to sustain a business. We’re
also increasing our advertising efforts by offering free CDC signs to businesses that would like to post them around their office, and helping people realize that washing your hands needs to be a way of life for everyday, not just today.”
And in many, if not most, states, print businesses are considered “essential,” as well they should be.
“Our studios are considered ‘essential businesses’ so they remain open,” said Elliot Parks, COO of SpeedPro. “And [SpeedPro studios] have banded together. We’re seeing a lot of activity on our message boards, and they’re gathering a lot of ideas for things they can print or things they can do during the downtime to get through it. They’re leaning on each other, and the home office is doing everything they can to support them, as well.”
Companies that heavily served the events market were especially hit, with events being cancelled pretty much everywhere, and SpeedPro studios that specialized in event graphics were especially hit. (A quick look at some of the comments in our preliminary survey results confirms that event graphics providers took a hit early on in the crisis.)
Some are even going beyond printing. SpeedPro Chicago Loop is volunteering to run errands or perform tasks for their clients and others in the greater Chicagoland community that fall into the “at-risk” category. (By the way, the classification of printing as an “essential” business varies by state. Minnesota, for example, had initially considered printing and paper to be “non-essential,” which drew the ire of the Printing Industry Midwest, which successfully lobbied to change that status.)
The essential nature of printing is obvious to us, but it is most conspicuous in the area of signage.
“All of our Image360, Signs By Tomorrow, and Signs Now centers have been impacted in some way by the COVID
19 pandemic,” said Ray Palmer, president of the Sign and Graphics Division, Alliance Franchise Brands. “Thankfully, in most states, sign and graphics centers are considered essential businesses because we supply safety and critical signage for hospitals, testing facilities, banks and restaurants, and other essential businesses. Many of our centers remain open providing these important services.”
Signage has become an important—and, yes, essential— print application. Sacramento, Calif.ornia’s Time Printing Solution Provider is using their Heidelberg Versafire to print CDC signage for hospitals and businesses to encourage social distancing and hand-washing. And HP also cited several Latex customers that are producing important signage, such as Kirkwood Printing of Wilmington, Mass., that is printing outdoor wayfinding signage for drive-thru testing centers, as well as signage for retailers indicating that they are closed. Not the happiest of signs, but it’s signage.
Equipment manufacturers are also stepping up to help out their customers.
“Roland DGA is dedicated to doing everything we can to support our customers and partners during the ongoing crisis,” said Dan Wilson, marketing director for Roland DGA. “We are also focused on providing ideas, useful content and inspiration to make the best of this difficult situation.”
“In the meantime, we’re getting work out the door just as fast as it comes in,” Bult said, “ but ask me again in 30 days!”
The crisis and its effects change almost daily. Feel free to share your stories and experiences, either in comments below or by writing to me at richard@whattheythink.com. I’ll be “checking in” periodically as the crisis continues—and hopefully abates. ● Read More… Find article at PrintingNews. com/21126685
COME PhotoSails takes billboard advertising out to sea. SAIL AWAY
PhotoSails (www. photosails.com) was an invention born of necessity. In the late 1990s, Aaron By Richard Romano
Kiss ran a sailboat chartering company in Ft. Lauderdale, and one of his promotional strategies was handing out pamphlets on the beach. These
PhotoSails founder Aaron Kiss
ended up littering the beaches, so the city passed an ordinance banning the handing out of print pamphlets.
“I needed a way to get to the people without littering or causing problems with the city,” Kiss said. “So we decided to paint up a sail with my logo, my slogan and my phone number and started sailing up and down the beaches. I increased my income by 400% in six months and put five other boats out of business.”
The effectiveness of sailboat advertising thus proven, Kiss started working with other local businesses.
“I had some friends who owned their own businesses and asked me if I could make a sail for them,” he said. “They couldn’t really afford what I wanted to do, so I made a giant 600-square-foot Velcro sail with stick-on letters and numbers, and I would write messages and put logos on it. When people wanted to hire me for a day of sailing, I’d charge them my charter rate.”
Things were moving along swimmingly until there came a turning point.
“One day my phone rang and it was Anheuser-Busch and they asked me if I could put photographs on sailboat sails,” he said. “I said yes, and they took out a contract for four months, which turned into two years.”
And thus was born PhotoSails.
This is how the PhotoSails model works: Someone wants to buy a boat, so they go through the company selling the boat—at the time of PhotoSails’ founding in 1999, Kiss had a relationship with Hunter. Once Kiss secured a contract with an advertiser, Project1_Layout 1 4/8/2020 5:01 PM Page 1
such as Anheuser-Busch, he would turn to the location manager for Hunter and decide what size boat the client wanted,
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depending on their budget or other requirements.
“I would go to the Hunter local management and they
would contract me a brand-new boat,” Kiss said.
Boats are not minor investments, and a fair number of the people who want to buy a boat can’t really afford one.
“Hunter had a buyer’s incentive program,” Kiss said. “They would call the people that were considering buying the boat that we wanted to use and ask them simply, ‘Are you not buying the boat because of the price of the boat or financial issues?’ They would always say ‘yes,’ and Hunter would turn to them and say, ‘Well, we have a guy that would like to use the boat for three months and we have figured out a way to drop the price $30,000, $40,000, even $50,000. Are you interested?’”
So in exchange for having a big ad on the sail, owners could substantially reduce the cost of the boat.
Early on, PhotoSails worked with Hunter exclusively.
“They really are the Honda of boats; they’re very reliable, they’re not expensive, as far as sailboats go, they’re easy to work on, and they have a mast system that really worked for the type of sales we were building,” Kiss said. “That has snowballed into thousands of people all over the world who, whether they have Hunters or not, want to get paid to sail their own sailboats around, which is, trust me, the best job in the world.”
Printing on sails, as you can well imagine, is not an easy process.
“You can’t just take a sail and stick it through a printer,” he said.
Kiss prefers to keep a lid on his specific production process, “but I can tell you this. We use a process that laminates four layers of cloth together that allows us to use CMYK color separation and digital imaging, using EFI VUTEks and some other of the major printers, that allow us to do double-sided imaging.”
PhotoSails has a patent on a process for making opaque sails.
“We are the owner of opaque sails—that way, no sunlight penetrates through, and even in backlit situations, you would never know what’s on the other side of the sail.”
The challenge is that the
substrate that it is printed on has to not just look aesthetically pleasing, but actually function as a sail.
“We can’t just take a vinyl, stick it through a printer, and expect to make a flat object into an airfoil,” Kiss said. “It just doesn’t work. We actually tried it, and it just doesn’t sail well at all, and it doesn’t look good.”
A lot of the work is done in software, and they have adapted their CAD programs to create three-dimensional airfoils in multiple pieces. They then use what they call variablemolding tables to consolidate the pieces together.
“It creates a proper airfoil that allows sailboats to sail as well as, if not better than, the sail technology that’s out there today,” Kiss said.
It’s the opaqueness of the PhotoSails sail that is the important element of the process. Most sailboat sails are translucent—when you see them out on the water on a sunny day, the sun shines through and lights them up, and it’s a rather beautiful sight—the kind of effect that makes someone want to buy a boat in the first place. However, when you have paid advertising on both sides of a sail, the sun can’t shine through; it would be the sail equivalent of showthrough. The only way to accomplish this on a translucent sail is to mirror the image on both sides of the sail precisely using multiple pieces of sail cloth.
“It’s a nightmare process and one side is backwards,” Kiss said. “If you miss the mirroring perfectly, then it looks like it’s blurry.”
PhotoSails has grown consistently from year-to-year, although sail-based advertising does require a fairly significant advertising budget.
“Almost all of our clients are Fortune 500 companies,” Kiss said. “This is not for Billy Bob’s Pizza Shack. This isn’t a bus wrap or a park bench or something like that. This is something that is dealing with half a million- and million-dollar yachts.”
The boat doesn’t even need to leave the dock—which presents an interesting way to get around sign codes regulating
advertising signage.
“We’ve been doing a beach program called Beach Billboards,” Kiss said. “Coca-Cola wanted to have their signage on a beach, but that’s highly regulated. We were putting our signs on sailboat rentals, and people were walking by them every day and looking at them. And the rental people loved it because they’re getting a free set of sails and getting subsidized by Coca-Cola for putting the sail up. So they’re making money without the boat even going out.”
PhotoSails billboards have Read More… Find article at PrintingNews. com/21126895
SIGN CONNECTION THE
Tips for signs & graphics companies during COVID-19
It’s impossible to ignore the vast changes that have shaken our economy and our industry over the past several weeks and months. We are all adjusting to the very real impact of the COVID19 pandemic, and will likely still be feeling it for months to come. Specifi cally in the signs and graphics industry, COVID-19 has been an incredible challenge, as it has been for nearly every industry; and it’s also been an opportunity to truly value the strength of graphic design and signage in the modern world.
Ideally, we will all be able to recover quickly, as a society, a business community and an industry from the effect of this pandemic. But in the meantime, we have all had to learn fast and on our feet how signs and graphics can evolve in the face of a truly unexpected crisis. In many ways, the services and products offered by signs and graphics businesses are more valuable than ever before. Our Image360 franchise system has grappled with COVID-19 just like all signs companies, but we have also learned valuable lessons I think every signs business can benefi t from. By Burke Cueny
Focus on Existi ng Customers
Many marketing tactics are focused on attracting new leads. Now, however, is the time to maintain, and ideally strengthen, the bonds between your business and your most frequent existing customers. Connect with them regularly to get a sense for how their business is doing, and to see if there are any graphic solutions to the problems they may be facing. See if there are ways to be fl exible with their needs, or accommodate
requests for lower cost. Use content marketing to keep your customer lists up to date on ways graphics and signage are playing a central role in adjusting to the COVID-19 pandemic – social distancing signs, open for delivery graphics and designs showing proper hand washing techniques. Our Image360 centers have had the most success during this period by doubling down on the partnerships they’ve built over the years, and demonstrating their value to existing customers more than ever before.
Find Visual Soluti ons for COVID-19 Business Challenges
In many ways, COVID-19 has been an unusually visual experience for all of us, considering we are dealing with an invisible virus. So much of the language around the pandemic is visual – fl attening the curve, envisioning six feet of distance between people, gloves and facemasks to protect vulnerable populations, videos and graphics of properly washing your hands. There are countless ways businesses can use strong design to support their customers, communicate with clients and the public,
and use graphics to drive sales, even in a world of social distancing. In a time where people are worried and anxious about the future, signs and graphics businesses have an ability to provide clear, visual communication that can help maintain calm. Spend time brainstorming ways to help your clients communicate, even during a challenging situation. It will only strengthen your ability to provide useful graphic design in the future when the pandemic is, mercifully, over.
Be a Goodwill Partner with Your Local Business Community
It’s no secret that the economic impact of COVID-19 has been vast. Businesses are struggling to pay bills and employees and be a useful partner to businesses and clients during this tumultuous time. The same holds true for the signs and graph
ics industry, as many print shops are also struggling to make it through. But even in the middle of these challenges, a local business community survives and thrives together.
Find ways to support your neighboring businesses – do restaurants need signs alerting customers that they’re still open for delivery or takeout under shelter-in-place orders? Do essential businesses need signs that remind customers to stay six feet away from each other? It may make sense to see if you can offer these resources inexpensively or free, as a gesture of goodwill to the broader community.
Many of our Image360 centers have offered banners to restaurants and other businesses for free, as a gesture of their support for all businesses in their market. This kind of giveback shows the values of your business, and it’s a measure of goodwill that your community will remember long after our current crisis is over.
Look to the Future
Now is an excellent time to take stock of where things stand with your business, and to consider any resources or options available to you, including the Federal CARES Act. There are a variety of franchise opportunities, Image360 being one of them, that offer a strong network of support for existing businesses wishing to convert to a franchise. This allows them to access resources that are especially valuable during painful and unforeseen circumstances like our current pandemic. There are also business associations, networking connections, other signs and graphics shops in town that may be interested in joining forces – now is the time to think creatively, not only about how you will make it through the current crisis, but what you see in the future for your business, in a year or in fi ve years. Challenging times like right now are also a chance to take stock, and plan for your future.
We have all learned things about our businesses, our communities and ourselves during this crisis. The signs and graphics industry is strong, and built to withstand challenging periods like this one. My hope is that by taking into account some of this advice we’ve gleaned from our network of Image360 centers and the experiences of the industry at large, all signs businesses will be able to see a way through our current situation together. ● Read More… Find article at PrintingNews. com/21127160
Burke Cueny is the VP of Marketi ng & Communicati ons for Image360. Formerly, he provided services to the Sign and Graphics Division of Allegra Network.
New owner Greg Ellison takes on the learning curve at SpeedPro Denver. GETTING UP TO SPEED
One of the interesting consequences of the franchise model is that very often it attracts print business owners whose backgrounds are far afi eld of the commercial printing industry, or even the wide-format printing industry. This has the effect of bringing new ideas into the business and the industry at large, as these owners are not saddled with “the way things have always been done.” That said, becoming the owner of a print business is not without its learning curve.
Last November, Greg Ellison became the new owner of SpeedPro Denver, and like a lot of franchise owners—and SpeedPro studio owners— Ellison doesn’t have a print background. He spent most of his early career in telecommunications as an engineer, until the repeated churn of mergers and acquisitions led him to grow disenchanted with that industry.
“I reached a point in time when I’d had enough,” he said. “I asked for a package and they were nice enough to give it to me. I wanted to do something completely different. I knew I wanted to be a small business owner, so I started shopping for businesses and going through business brokers and broker magazines looking for what was interesting.”
With a manufacturing background, he was looking for something with a manufacturing focus, but also knew he wanted something business-tobusiness. He found that there wasn’t much that really fi t that mold, but did fi nd that printing and signage kept cropping up.
“I ended up gravitating toward the idea of getting into graphic printing,” he said.
A franchise broker put him touch with one sign franchise that was looking to open a new facility in the Denver area, but Ellison didn’t necessarily want By Richard Romano
to build a new business from the ground up.
“Working on a business for two or three years before I could write myself a paycheck was not very appealing to me,” he said.
The very next day, though, the franchise broker got back to Ellison with news of a SpeedPro franchise that was already established but needed new leadership. So he had a look.
“I found out that what they had here was really, really cool,” he said. “Not only is it wide-format graphics, but what really interested me about SpeedPro Denver is that most of the business comes from vehicle wraps, which I think are cool.”
And that, as they say, was that. Ellison became the new owner of SpeedPro Denver, the third owner since the studio was founded in 2006.
Seemingly thrown into the deep end, Ellison found the learning curve fairly steep—getting a handle on all the different kinds of substrates, let alone all the output devices, and what can print on what—but any diffi culty getting up to speed was mitigated by coming into an already-active studio that had highly experienced staff.
“I have a top-notch operations guy who’s also a graphic artist and he knows all the equipment out there,” Ellison said. “So that part of my learning curve—operations—turned out to be a low priority for me because I had expertise already in the studio.”
SpeedPro Denver has a small staff of three fulltime employees: an operations manager, a production employee who does prep work, as well as lamination, installations, and a front-desk person who answers phones, prepares estimates and handles customer service. He also utilizes a part-time marketing person, and a driver who does deliveries a couple hours a day.
SpeedPro Denver is heavily involved in vehicle
graphics, and a major client is the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT), which launched a bus service in 2016 called Bustangs, which runs from the Denver area out to the mountains.
“The previous owner had gotten into a contract with CDOT on Bustangs and we wrapped their 45-foot coaches,” Ellison said.
Late last year, CDOT launched Snowstangs, also 45-foot passenger buses which run from Denver to Colorado’s ski areas.
“We wrapped those as well. They’ve been a very good partner with us.”
Another major client is Mile High Food Trucks.
“That account is a lot of fun,” Ellison said. “They need a lot of design help, so my graphic artist truly likes doing work for them. He gets the opportunity to really get creative, and it helps them out a lot with their clients packaging customizing food trucks with well-designed wraps.”
While the Denver studio’s stock in trade is vehicle graphics, they also do their fair share of banners and wall and window graphics. Like some SpeedPro studios I have spoken with, SpeedPro Denver also sees growth opportunities in environmental or experiential graphics—the intersection of décor and signage—although he’s moving into it slowly.
One fun challenge to overcome was interacting with customers.
“I came from a design engineer/development engineer background and as such it was only about once a quarter would they allow the engineers to talk to a customer,” he said. “They didn’t let us get out much. So one of the things that’s been enjoyable is getting out and talking to customers and seeing what their problems are, what they’re trying to solve, and what kinds of cool things they want to do. That’s been the fun part.”
More challenging—and Ellison is certainly not alone on this—is getting a handle on pricing and estimating.
“It seems like you should be able to say, ‘This is what you want, this is how many prints, and this is how much I’ll charge you for it.’ But it feels like there’s a lot of
fuzzy logic in there that I’m still trying to get my head around.”
The change in ownership has lent itself to a heavy marketing push.
“There have been a lot of things that we’ve done since I came on board to introduce myself and the changeover of SpeedPro Denver from the previous owner to myself,” Ellison said.
But the bulk of the ongoing marketing is via search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) search advertising—“maintaining our name on the front page [of Google search results] and ranking as high on that front page list as possible,” he said.
It’s been a busy four months for Ellison, but an exciting time, as he learns not only the wide-format print business, but also the SpeedPro business.
“I have to add a shameless plug for SpeedPro,” he said. “When I was early in the investigation of SpeedPro trying to understand who they are and what they are, I found myself in a one-on-one conversation with Larry Oberly, the CEO, and was able to get his time for about 45 minutes and pick his brain. When you have a CEO who’s that dedicated to bringing in the right kind of people into his system, it really gave me a lot of faith and trust in the system and what they’re really trying to accomplish here.” ● Read More… Find article at PrintingNews. com/21122560
DENIM REIMAGINED
A new, more eco-friendly way to think about denim
The next time you put on that great pair of jeans, it is worth taking time to consider what their environmental impact is.
It takes approximately 1,500 gallons of water to grow the 1.5 pounds of cotton required to make a pair of jeans. The massive amount of water (an average of 900 to 1,000 gallons) required in the dyeing and washing process gets them looking and feeling just right. The pollution caused by deposition of the dyestuffs and the subsequent laundry process is also factored.
But what if you could have a truly eco-friendly pair of jeans that look great and are even more comfortable than the pair you love? That’s one of the projects undertaken by the Intech Group, founded in 2001, as they worked to develop their pigment inks and printers for digital textile printing.
“Back in 2010 to 2014, the company was looking at two different expansion markets where water-based inks for digital printing could add value and deliver a reduced environmental impact: ceramic inks for ceramic tiles and pigment inks for fabric,” said Dalton Cheng, head of technology at Intech By Cary Sherburne
Digital Limited. “There were players already in production of ceramic inks, so we decided to pursue pigment inks for textiles in roll-to-roll printing. No one really understood at that time what that would truly mean. It seemed like an intriguing idea, and we decided to pursue pigment inks for textiles since we wanted to be an early adopter.”
Cheng, who had been working for Behr Paints, quit his job in 2014 to join the effort and spent more than two years developing the formulation and process.
“We started commercially printing for designers, brands and fabric mills in 2016,” he said.
The development process required not only development of the inks, which are created from organic materials rather than using rare earth minerals that have a huge negative environmental impact; it also required development of a printing system that could handle the inks and deliver the requisite quality.
Today, the Intech Digital 190T printer, equipped with eight Ricoh Gen 5E printheads, does just that with its ZERO-D
(Inset Photo) Dalton Cheng (Above) A model wearing the ZERO-D digitally printed dress at the COTTON USA booth. The fabric is 100% cotton poplin, and the entire dress, from the black background to the red roses, is all pigment.
technology (zero discharge, refl ecting its waterless digital printing approach). The downside today, according to Cheng, is the speed, which is at 25 to 40 linear yards per hour. Intech currently has fi ve of these printers printing direct to fabric in its Chinese factory.
“We’ve been looking for partners that want to also achieve the quality and eco-friendliness our printers deliver,” Cheng said, “but that has been somewhat diffi cult due to the amount of misinformation out there about pigment inks for textile printing, and so many missteps and even misrepresentation from some of the manufacturers. There is still a huge education need to get the word out about the potential for
Intech Digital 190T printer.
pigment inks in textiles.”
Recreating the denim look was one area of focus for the company.
“Essentially, you scan a pair of jeans using a fl atbed scanner and adjust the image digitally to capture weave effects, contrast, wash effects, etc., and you have a digital representation of that pair of jeans that can be printed on just about any bleached white fabric,” Cheng said. “The resulting effect is almost indistinguishable from twill weave denim but with much, much less environmental impact. The benefi t with our system is all the design work is done digitally, and the normal multi-step process of dyeing, washing/ laundry, and processing to make a pair of fi nished jeans is now
reduced to one waterless printing step. With this digital representation, you can digitally add different wash effects, adjust colors and do other things that would normally be performed on a fi nished pair of jeans.”
Cheng noted that with conventional denim dyeing processes, not only is there the vast consumption of water and the associated pollution, but “you can’t really change the color. The only thing you can do is change the shade of color by removing the color through different washes or with laser technology. With digital printing and Photoshop, you can do just about anything, which opens up all sorts of new fashion possibilities for denim. You can make the jeans any color you
want using our CMYK inks. Different wash effects can be produced digitally. Switching from indigo blue to red can be done very quickly in Photoshop. We can add placement prints on the jeans through panel printing, have them wrap around the leg, making them customized. Perhaps if you travel a lot,
Jeans in any color, made with cotton, linen, Tencel, viscose, even silk!
you might want to print family photos on the inside of your garments so you can keep your family close while traveling, seeing their images when you dress and undress.”
Intech can also print on soft manmade natural materials like Tencel.
“We can go with 97% Tencel, 3% Spandex,” Cheng said. “You can’t do that with conventional denim manufacturing because the Tencel fi bers are damaged in the indigo dyeing process. But with Tencel + ZERO-D, you have a total water footprint (fabric + pigment) that is a maximum of 3% that of cotton denim (75 gallons vs. 2,500 gallons per pair). That is an amazing fi gure.”
The idea of changing the fabric for jeans is signifi cant.
“One of the technical problems with skinny jeans, for example, is they get loose around the hips and knees after some amount of wear,” he said. “If you change the construction of the fabric to something like a panama weave, that problem can be alleviated. But traditional denim manufacturers can’t do that; they are stuck with a twill weave. Manufacturers also use massive amounts of water in the wash/laundry process to make the jeans softer and more
Close-up of digitally printed fabric on textured dobby weave.
comfortable to wear for consumers immediately after purchase. However, to resolve the water consumption and pollution issues in the denim industry, this wash process needs to be eliminated. This is where changing the fabric can also come into play. There are so many bottom-weight fabrics out there that are naturally soft and comfortable to wear. They could be made from fi bers like viscose, modal, linen, even silk. For example, we can print the denim patterns on 100%
crepe-back-satin viscose or silk. In this way, on the outside, they look and feel just like jeans, but on the inside, against your skin, it’s an amazing soft silky feeling. All of this is part of our concept of ‘Denim Reimagined,’ with new denim fashion and designs on a diverse variety of fabrics, delivering style, fashion, comfort and ultra-sustainability all at once.”
Creating a denim look with heat transfer dye sublimation is very diffi cult.
“It requires 50–60 milliliters of ink per square meter to achieve the right shade of blue/ indigo,” Cheng said. “You can’t transfer that much dye accurately from heat transfer paper. The dyes bleed/migrate and create a blurry, blotchy mess. The same thing happens with reactive dye digital printing. With our pigment inks, given the photographic fi delity of our printing, you can’t tell the difference between conventional denim and our denim look unless you look at the back of the fabric.”
The Intech printing process uses minimal water. The fabric is pretreated, dried in a baking tunnel, printed, dried again, post-treated, dried again and fi nally softened with a fi nal drying stage. There is no need for a post-print washing cycle. The fabric is ready to cut, sew and wear. Pre- and post-treatment solutions are determined by the type of fabric to be printed; in most cases, the post-treatment is a polymeric
solution to bring up the dry and wet crock to apparel standards (dry 4, wet 3, at least). A standard fabric softener is used in the softening process.
Another advantage of Intech’s pigment printing process is that the ink is actually absorbed into the fabric yet still delivers fantastic color; in other pigment printing processes, he says, the pigments lay on top of the fabric as a coating, much like DTG and screen printing, to deliver the required color gamut. However, this signifi - cantly impacts the fabric hand to give it a rubbery or cardboard feel, and the print cracks and peels with use like regular DTG and screen prints.
In terms of cost for denim production, fabric printed with this methodology carries a cost of $4.00 to $5.00 per linear yard, for the entire process. Intech inks sell at a pretty stan
Intech pigment printing produces high quality color, fine details.
dard market prices of about $30 per liter. If an organization wanted to purchase the production system, Cheng said it starts at a sub $250,000 investment.
“We recommend purchase of two printers, both for
Karin Malmstrom of COTTON USA with Dalton Cheng. The mannequin and Cheng are in pigment printed apparel, top and bottom. Cheng’s shirt is printed silk charmeuse
redundancy and to increase throughput,” he said. “That gives you 50 to 80 linear yards per hour for less than $500,000, and the system is extremely reliable. It’s like the Energizer Bunny, it just keeps going and going.”
The system uses ErgoSoft RIP software and works with Pantone color matching.
The quality, reliability and reduced waste are important in the ROI calculation.
“You have to consider the total cost of ownership—the total lifecycle cost across the supply chain. Being able to produce on-demand, producing the designs that sell, and quickly cutting out the ones that do not do well to minimize risk are important considerations.
Today, Intech is producing apparel created from digitally printed fabric using its pigmentbased inks for a number of wellknown brands, not restricted to denim. The company also works with cut-and-sew operations in China to deliver fi nished garments. Over time, as the industry becomes more eco-sensitive, Cheng hopes to be able to not only grow the printing business but also sell printers and ink.
“We believe we’ll get there,” he said. “When we attend industry shows, like MAGIC and the denim-focused Kingpins event, attendees are stunned by the apparel quality. But it will take a little more time and education to gain the kind of traction we hope to see.”
So the next time you put on those jeans, think about their environmental impact, consider what it would be like to have them produced with your favorite fabric and in your favorite color, and stay tuned with developments as this technology becomes, as Cheng hopes, more widespread and available. ● Read More… Find article at PrintingNews. com/21124714
