View from the Top

One of America's top-volume contract printers offers a different perspective on the realm of digital printing.
Sept 1, 2007

By Tom Vann

Let me start with full disclosure: I have tested many, if not all, of the current crop of direct-to-garment inkjet printers and have kept my eye on this evolving technology in respect to cost and production capabilities. That said, I don't claim to be an inkjet-to-garment expert.

As recently as this spring, my suppliers and industry colleagues were reporting roughly the same costs, output rates and maintenance issues that have shaped the opinions I'm about to share — though it's possible that I'm not informed on advances announced during the past few months. (That's how fast this industry segment changes!)

When I started screen printing in my parents' basement 20 years ago, dreaming of prosperity, I took on any job to make a dollar. My focus for several years was custom work for direct accounts, and we printed tons of small orders — everything from jackets to jerseys. However, I soon determined that I wanted to target large-volume clients. By 1995, our company had completed the transition and concentrated solely on contract work, often made up of larger orders. However, while volume for Target Graphics has increased dramatically, servicing clients with 48- to 72-piece orders is not uncommon.

So my views on inkjet, or direct-to-garment (DTG), printers are formed by my needs and experience as a fairly large contract screen printer. Our growth over the years has forced me to focus on the economic realities of screen printing, and that accumulated knowledge may apply to shops of any size contemplating the brave new world of DTG.

Owners of smaller print shops often undervalue their own time, and bad days are overshadowed by hopes of that next "big job." If you're looking at DTG with that kind of hopefulness, you might not make a smart decision.

My success is based on this bottom line: A print shop owner must first consider himself a highly paid employee, and the business must make a profit during every hour of operation (or be on a plan to do so). When you evaluate getting into digital decorating, you should apply the same principle.

No Muss? Maybe Some Fuss
Without a doubt, DTG's promise of bypassing three primary screen printing departments (film output, screen making and production) sounds like heaven on earth. Just think, all those headaches will go away. But does that make DTG a smart investment for your company?

The answer requires that you take a close look at your operation. Are you a screen printer looking to diversify? An embroiderer who wants to add an easy in-house T-shirt shop? Maybe you're a screen printer who intends to convert exclusively to inkjet garment printing.

The idea that DTG is "easy street" is a matter of perspective. For a competent printer, traditional screen printing is hardly a headache. It's just a process. Odds are, if you're a good printer making a good living, then you won't be selling off your screen printing department anytime soon. I suspect the current crop of digital inkjet printers can't compete with your production rate and per-unit cost.

On the other hand, if you are just breaking into the small order and personalization business, your needs are much different. You may cringe at the idea of all the screen printing variables, in which case DTG might work for you.

Maintenance free?
Another promise of DTG is low maintenance compared to the work required to set up and maintain a regular screen printing operation. Well, the truth is that inkjet printers are prone to clog, especially if you don't follow the manufacturer's recommended maintenance schedule. Your profit margin depends on maintaining continual production, so you have to factor printer downtime and the cost of replacement parts into your DTG business plan as you would in any process.

In terms of production and customer service, what's your contingency plan for downtime? Does your business plan include a second DTG machine that can keep pumping out garments? Do you go with one printer and hope your customers are patient when problems crop up? Or do you know another apparel decorator you can rely upon for backup?

Back in the analog world, there's no dispute that screen presses are proven workhorses that will print millions of T-shirts with the most basic maintenance (as long as the maintenance is done consistently). Of course, there's more to maintaining a traditional print shop than just the press — you've got screen storage, ink-mixing areas, wash-out booths, exposure units, emulsions, meshes, etc. But my point is that maintenance in an analog shop is just part of the cost of doing business and that will be true for a digital-only shop as well.

For Whom Does the Digi-Toll?
I see three categories of decorators out there who may consider DTG, but in my opinion, only No. 3 is a slam dunk:

1. Screen printers who need a low-cost short-run solution.

2. Decorators who simply want to replace traditional screen printing with digital decorating.

3. Niche market decorators who specialize in one-offs, including online shops that sell direct to consumers at full retail markups.

Are you among any of these groups? If so, the first thing to consider is whether you want a business based on short runs because that's the market DTG printers currently serve best. I steer away from the short-run business, but we still get our share, so I would consider Target to be in category No. 1.

If you're not sure, do some math. For shop owners who are already successful at whatever volume level, determine your average order size. If that average order is in the 12- to 48-piece range, the economics of DTG could work for you. If your average is larger than that, you need to sharpen your digital pencil.

Let's say you are servicing larger average orders and you have decided that DTG wouldn't pay for itself as a production tool, but you're considering one of the less expensive inkjets to use as a proofing device.

How closely does the color of artwork on your computer monitor match your finished prints? You'll get the same or better accuracy from DTG proofs, but I think it's a little risky for the average printer. If you are a skilled artist (or you employ one) who has mastered color management, DTG proofs could work for you, but I suspect a digital proof system might increase your rejection rate. DTG imaging is simply not a one-to-one substitute for a screen printed image.

If you are a small printer, perhaps a manual shop, who really never dug the production end of screen printing, then DTG may be for you regardless of average order size. Your business probably survives on a healthy markup of custom products and less on efficiency, which is the key to profitability for a contract shop. In this case, you may very well be served by dumping the screen printing and shifting completely to DTG.

If so, should you keep the screen printing equipment? Probably not. If you've got a business plan that justifies going all digital, that plan probably works best if you reduce your production labor and push everything you can to DTG. If you run analog screen printing and digital side by side, you might be missing the point of reducing labor costs. The bottom line is that your staff must be making money every hour of the workday, and if one department is stagnant because of the other, then you will lose money. If you do replace your traditional press(es) with inkjet printers, consider contracting out all jobs larger than 48 or 72 pieces.

Nice Niches
Niche marketers rightfully see digital garment printing as a great deal. I know of Web sites offering numerous T-shirt designs, and inkjet-to-garment printers are perfect for one-offs at a high retail price of $15 to $40 per garment. The profit potential here is in very short runs for high-margin prices.

If you're in this market, you might also take a look at transfers. Digital transfers (thermal and sublimation) have made great strides in the past 10 to 15 years. Just like DTG, digital transfers are profitable even when you print "onesies" and "twosies." I would argue that transfers afford the same or better quality than inkjet garment printers, and at a lower price (both in capital investment and labor).

For me, the decision to stay on the digital sidelines has been a simple one. I've tested the best of DTG printers and have not found one that can crank out work at the same rate as my automatic presses. Target Graphics produced nearly 3 million imprints in 2006 with six automatics. Our median order is 350 shirts, and there are plenty of orders for more than 5,000 units. In fact, we just added two more presses to take on our growth.

Adding DTG to my shop would necessitate new staff to run the digital printer because pulling labor from an automatic press would cost us money, output and, ultimately, customers. If we added DTG, we would have to market it heavily to keep that staff busy for 2,080 working hours a year. How many small orders would that require?

Economic Reality
DTG manufacturers are trying to sell you a product, which is a totally legimate business. However, I've been in presentations that include ROI models that I think are overly optimistic. As every apparel decoration business is different, you should build your own ROI spreadsheet to evaluate the profitability of DTG machines. A snapshot of my digital ROI spreadsheet includes a mix of scenarios (See Tom Vann's Bottom Line, below).

Surprising isn't it? This is not fuzzy math, though digital printer vendors and distributors might disagree. My point is that you should do your own ROI research. In reality, I'm not suggesting inkjet garment printer makers are doing anything different than manufacturers of traditional automatic screen presses have always done — overstate production rates. For instance, my automatic presses are supposed to cycle at 1,080 per hour, but I have great employees and there isn't a three-person crew that can consistently produce more than 650 per hour on any automatic, considering downtime for fatigue, inking and other factors.

The most overlooked cost in any ROI calculation is overhead, including the owner's salary. There is no escaping it, your business costs money every hour of the workday. Only you can calculate whether or not your operation can support the real cost of DTG.

Quality Issues
Quality is always a matter of perspective. Our company is highly regarded for four-color process, so my opinion of inkjet quality is colored by that background. Other printers may be terrible at four-color process, so their needs are different. I am still uncertain about the quality of DTG machines in general, but I do know the expensive models ($80,000 to $250,000) can produce excellent prints, while only the best of the lower cost machines ($10,000 to $30,000) produce adequate quality prints. Image resolution is great for inkjets in general, it is the density of ink that improves with the price of the printer.

Then there's the question of digital printing on dark-colored garments. Some DTG printer makers have recently produced what the industry in general claimed it had already delivered a few years ago: an inkjet configuation that lays down a white underbase on darks before printing the actual image.

The digital printers with white ink underlay solutions — at least the ones I have seen and worked with — don't meet my quality standards. The opacity is lacking and output is slower yet for a machine that was already slow (compared to traditional automatic presses). Having said that, I believe white printers will improve. In fact, at the Schaumburg Imprinted Sportswear Show in August I saw that the opacity of one high-profile brand printer had improved greatly.

That's one of the things about digital — change comes quickly and speeds do increase. However, don't be fooled into thinking inkjet-to-garment is new technology. It has been around for a long time. What's new is inkjet being adapted to print finished garments — a tough nut to crack.

Even if inkjet manufacturers and distributors can make their printer fly through demos, the rubber hits the road on your shop floor. If you don't know what you're doing, quality control can be a headache. I have heard stories of very high reject rates.

Let's assume a bunch of what I've heard is exaggerated, I think a conservative figure might be 5% for digital printing. In my shop, we have less than 0.5% spoilage per 100,000 printed garments. I don't think DTG will hit that level of quality control for some time.

Volume Questions
Will DTG ever print 500 shirts per hour? Real world production rates of 400 to 500 shirts per hour is the norm for automatic screen printing presses. Some inkjet printer manufacturers insist their machines will print that fast and only get faster. How much faster? Remember, inkjet technology has matured and remains a short-run solution (and a very good one in many cases) in the rest of the graphics industry. Volume output in the digital realm is being done by laser or cylinder presses, not inkjets.

I don't believe inkjet printing will speed up enough to convince me to replace my automatics. Some DTG machines claim an output rate of 300 per hour, but the demo I saw that hit that rate was for a left-chest print. A large, full-front print will cause output rates to drop dramatically. To their credit, most manufacturers currently claim more realistic output rates of 30 to 100 prints per hour for single-platen machines.

Multiple printhead machines have come to market that print several shirts simultaneously. The cost of these units is going to be high, probably around $250,000. I can't see recouping that investment in my kind of shop, partly because I suspect high-volume multihead machines also will be high-maintenance machines.

Digital Diversity
Another thing to consider with DTG is that inkjet prints still require heat to cure the ink. A simple heat press will keep up with one DTG printer's output. For multiheads, you'll want a belt dryer. That uses a lot more juice than a heat press, so factor that in your ROI calculations.

Digital transfers are a viable option for high-volume digital garment printing. Many advances have been made printing transfers with inkjets spraying sublimation and other inks. The Epson 4800 inkjet printer is a graphics industry workhorse and often the printer of choice for transfers. Though inkjet transfer printing is slow — several minutes per full-size image — there's a good high-volume workaround. You could buy several 4800s (at about $3,000 each), hook them up to bulk ink systems and let them run overnight, saving lots of labor.

Another potential high-volume digital system that intrigues me is thermal transfer. The issue with thermal transfer has always been the ugly clear background that transfers to your garment along with the image you want to print. New transfer papers coming to market reportedly do not transfer any background residue. If that's true, this technology has potential to deliver some serious volume because thermal transfers can be run through color laser printers at 10 to 30 pages per minute.

Editor's Note: Tom Vann founded Target Graphics Ltd., Naperville, Ill., in 1987 and has grown it to be one of America's 25 top volume contract screen printing companies. Target exclusively services promotional products distributors and wearables manufacturers and no longer does small custom orders. Running six automatic presses, Target printed and shipped more than 1.7 million finished garments in 2006. This year, Target grew to eight automatic presses to handle the consistent growth. The shop has won countless awards for expertise in four-color process printing, especially on darks. As you will read in the following pages, Vann believes inkjet garment printers are not designed to pump out the volume that a company his size produces. Nevertheless, Vann is no enemy of progress and his provocative contrarian's views on this red-hot technology trend should be of interest to all apparel decorators. — T.M.

Visit targetgraphicsltd.com or e-mail Tom at vann@targetgraphicsltd.com.

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