Decorators Open Up on DTG Workflow, Profits

Impressions interviewed apparel decorators from all corners of the industry to discuss the promise and the real-world results of investing in digital inkjet-to-garment printers. 
Sept 1, 2009

By Deborah Sexton, Contributing Writer

Since its introduction to the decorated apparel industry several years ago, direct-to-garment printing has been heralded as a game-changer — a disruptive technology that would dramatically change the way shops conduct business. It would allow decorators to tackle small orders, suppliers said. It would let shops offer personalization and print photographs with amazing detail, they promised. And it would dramatically reduce set-up time, they’ve claimed.

Of course, while it’s one thing for industry suppliers to sing the praises of new technology, it’s quite another for decorators to do so. So what do in-the-trenches shop owners using DTG think of it? Does it live up to the hype? From home-based businesses to top-volume decorators, the answer has been a resounding “yes.”

“It has even more capabilities than I thought it would have, and we’re learning how to use it better and better,” says Rick Roth, president, Mirror Image, Pawtucket, R.I. His shop, which traditionally has focused almost exclusively on high-volume orders, purchased a Mimaki direct-togarment printer recently to appease the growing number of customers who only need small runs. “You can’t set up screen printing fast enough to print fewer than 300 shirts profitably; you would have to charge too much. This gives people an option for short runs. Big customers need small quantities sometimes too.”

Offering this option is important to keep customers from otherwise migrating to full-service shops that can fulfill all of their decoration needs. “A lot of customers want one-stop shopping, and you don’t want them going elsewhere,” Roth says. “They don’t want to deal with a bunch of companies, so you want to do what’s best for them.”

Driving Their Decisions
Like Roth, many decorators have adopted direct-to-garment technology to gain business from customers seeking smaller orders. However, that’s hardly the only reason they’re adding it. For Scott Trammel, Dennison T-Shirt Graphics, Dennison, Ohio, adding a Brother Intl. direct-togarment printer was all about the promise of improved image quality.

“I saw it in use at another T-shirt print business, and the quality of detail just blew me away,” Trammel says. “The quality of the print was the No. 1 reason I purchased a direct-to-garment machine. I also saw that it could print on towels, coasters, shirts, hoodies — the technology is just awesome.”

That’s not to say that order size wasn’t also a driver in his decision, Trammel acknowledges. “We had customers who wanted a dozen T-shirts in one or two colors, and the set-up time was a killer,” he says. “We can save so much time, and we can offer [lower] minimums on the types of graphics that no one else in our area can offer.”

Roxanne Wanja, owner, Katy Trophies & Awards, Katy, Texas, offered trophy engraving and embroidery, but had customers asking for screen printing. “We had a client with a need for it before we bought the AnaJet [digital printer],” she says. “There was a baseball league and on site at games we were doing embroidered ‘baseball mom’ shirts. We knew we could also sell printed shirts.”

What appealed to Wanja was how much easier it was to print digitally than trying to set up screen printing. “The AnaJet is very user friendly,” she says. “It just printed out the product. I’m not very computer-literate, but it was easy to load the shirt and the computer software and just start printing.”

For Sam Wildt, owner, Palomar Printing, Worcester, Mass., adding an M&R i-Dot digital printer made perfect sense for his business model: His shop often sends customers online to create or upload T-shirt images for their orders. “This allows us to service those customers easily,” he says. “Plus, due to our location, we have a lot of walk-in traffic looking for anywhere from one to 24 shirts. We didn’t want to turn away those customers. It made sense to capture those customers at a higher dollar amount per garment.”

In an extremely competitive environment, direct-to-garment technology can give one shop the edge it needs over another, says Rob Dubow, president, Dubow Textile, St. Cloud, Minn. He purchased a Kornit direct-to-garment printer in early 2006, then bought a second unit in mid- 2008. “I realized that embroidery was a commodity; I needed to differentiate myself,” he says of the decision to buy the equipment. “With digital printing, I can sell more to my existing customers instead of creating a whole new customer base.”

Going for a higher-end unit like those offered by Kornit meant a significant investment, Dubow acknowledges, but he says it made sense for his business. For instance, his Kornit unit does the pretreatment inside, allowing him to use a gas dryer to cure instead of a press, which increased the production rate significantly. “When you look at a major purchase, the cost isn’t the issue, it’s the return,” he says. “And I have made my return on investment.”

How They’re Using It
Donna Tarter, Donna’s Decorated Apparel, Etc., Picayune, Miss., made a significantly smaller, but no less important investment in her shop’s SWF East DTG Kiosk. Her shop primarily offered embroidery, so she needed a way to meet the needs of customers wanting screen printing. “I thought this was the perfect solution,” she says. “And so far, it has been absolutely awesome. I can offer things to my customers that other printers can’t do, whether it’s one T-shirt or mouse pads, caps and thongs.”

Order sizes for Tarter range from one piece to 100 — about half being one- and two-color jobs, while the other half is for multi-color designs. Her customers and markets are “across the board,” she says, including the ATV community, baseball parks, truckers and special occasions.

Chris Kelly, Keltex Imprinted Apparel, Oceanview, N.J., uses his two M&R i-Dots to retain customers that he otherwise might’ve lost. “There are orders that show up at my door that I couldn’t do if it weren’t for digital,” he says. “Now I don’t have to turn anything away.”

Keltex uses its digital printers for a variety of segments, including retail stores, as well as fill-ins on screen print orders. “The fill-ins have a different look and feel, but when the client forgets to add eight pieces and needs them right away, I’m not about to set up screens for that,” Kelly says. “Under the circumstances, customers are fine with it.”

As a screen printing shop with M&R equipment, adding M&R digital equipment seemed like a logical step, Kelly says — and so far, the units have met his expectations. “It has been great for us and our customers,” he says. “It’s not going away either. I see myself having 12 of them, and doing bigger jobs. We can do very fine detail; it’s not halftones anymore.”

Brad Alpers, president, Repla Prints, Marietta, Ga., did beta-testing on a Brother digital printer for two years. He found out early in the testing that the machine definitely lived up to its hype. “Our customers got hooked on it,” he says. “We’ve been able to pick up smaller runs where we would’ve lost the business otherwise. Car owners love it because we can put their personal car on a shirt for an upcoming show. Overall, digital printing is great for special events because they want low quantities.”

Besides T-shirts, Alpers also prints coasters — about 500 every month. “We do them for a lot of photographers, who use them as promotional items.,” he says. “The ink works very well on coasters — it sinks right in. They’re ideal for the souvenir market because you can print photographs on them.”

Alpers says he rates his experience with digital printing as an 8.5 out of 10. “Sometimes the colors are way off, but most of the time, it knocks my socks off,” he says. “I printed an image of a big, juicy hamburger that looked so good, when I finished the shirt I went out and got a burger.”

Opening New Doors
Mark Francis, president, Creative Concepts of Jonesboro Inc., Jonesboro, Ark., owns three T-Jet printers, using them primarily for T-shirts, bags and hoodies — and often for one- and two-color images, although most orders are multiple colors. “We’ve used it for orders as large as 2,200 pieces,” he says. “We didn’t offer screen printing at the time, and it was easy to do digitally. We’ve done 150,000 shirts digitally now.”

As a contract decorator, Dubow caters almost exclusively to promotional products distributors, who sell his digitally decorated garments into retail, schools and corporations. While his shop most often does T-shirts on the Kornit digital printers, it also does hoodies, kidswear, blankets and polyester garments. “Now we’ll be able to do performancewear and jerseys,” he says. “We’re still getting used to the technology.”

Although direct-to-garment technology is most often associated with small orders, Dubow tackled a relatively large one using a Kornit. “Our average order size is 40 pieces, but we did a 2,500-piece order,” he recalls. “The design wasn’t conducive to screen printing, and the customer liked the hand of the digital print. They also knew that they’d be doing lots of fill-in orders, and they liked the repeatability.”

Direct-to-garment technology has been so well received at Dennison T-shirt Graphics that it has become the company’s core process. “It’s the backbone of our company now,” Trammel says. “Eighty percent of our business is digital, and the rest is screen printing.”

Trammel printed 3,000 shirts on his direct-to-garment unit in 2007 — that number increased to 13,000 last year. “It just went bananas; customers have really bought into it,” he says. “Once they see the quality and the feel, and they realize that they don’t have to order 36 garments, the process sells itself.”

Although T-shirts are the norm for his company, Trammel also has printed canvas frames, sweat pants, ball caps, tote bags, quilt panels and baby apparel using his direct-to-garment Brother printer. “We also can do sleeves and other placements. One customer wanted a logo across the shoulder and over the pocket of a zippered hoodie,” he says. “I told them we couldn’t do it with screen printing, but I showed him a sample of the direct-to-garment printing, and it looked unbelievable. He ended up ordering 25 of them from us. That kind of versatility sets us apart from the competition.”

Wildt says adding his i-Dot direct-togarment technology has opened many doors for his company. “We can service all of our customers now,” he says. “With walk-in customers, we get the grandma who wants six shirts for the summer because she has the grandkids over, and we get the guy having a birthday party for his daughter, and we can service them all. We’re not just building a new customer base — we’re building customer relationships.”

Making things easier for Wildt is that customers are surprisingly well-informed about direct-to-garment technology and how its results differ from those of screen printing. “They’re more educated than they were before, so they understand it,” he says. “We have customers coming in actually saying, ‘Do you do DTG?’ They also love the soft hand.”

Marketing the Technology
As thrilled as decorators have been with the results of adding direct-to-garment printing to their shops, they know that the technology isn’t going to sell itself. Like any new process, it requires a marketing push to spread the word to customers.

Wildt informs customers about his shop’s new capabilities via a large sign hanging outside that says, “We now offer digital printing on apparel.”

“It’s also on our Web site, and we’ve done an e-mail blast to our entire data- base of customers,” he says. “I also talked about it on some [online] industry forums, which led us to a couple of contracts with other decorators.”

Trammel’s shop has spread the word about its digital capabilities via ads on local radio stations and placemat ads in restaurants. Rather than marketing the technology itself, his shop markets the fact that it can do orders with no minimums. “Then they learn that the process has a sharp image that doesn’t crack or peel,” he says. “The results are phenomenal.”

Sometimes, getting customers to use the technology instead of another process is just a matter of showing them the results they can get, Trammel says. “I had a customer who wanted their logo screen printed, so I did a sample using digital printing and it looked awesome,” he says. “You may not think a design will look right going digital, but you have to try it. Sometimes it doesn’t work out, but other times it looks a lot better.”

Tarter touts the benefits of no minimums and no color limits. “When people place embroidery orders, I give them a T-shirt sample to sell the technology,” she adds.

Spreading the word about direct-togarment technology is as simple as mentioning it to current customers, Kelly says. “Talk it up and let them know you have it,” he says. “As soon as you get a six-color, 60-piece job, tell them how much it will cost with screen printing. They’ll sigh, and then you say, ‘I’ve got a digital printer that can do it for this much,’ and they’ll say, ‘OK, let’s go.’”

Be sure you’re marketing the benefits of the technology, not the technology itself, Alpers advises. “We didn’t market the printer,” he says. “We marketed a way to save customers money.” And much like the marketing messages from suppliers about the many benefits of direct-to-garment technology, that marketing promise has more than lived up to the hype.

Deborah Sexton, the former editor of Impressions, has been writing about the decorated apparel industry for 28 years. She also does marketing and public relations for decorated apparel companies. For more information or to comment on this article, e-mail Deborah at dsexton@ sbcglobal.net.

Hirsch Video Demonstrates Oversize Shirt Printing
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Decorators Open Up on DTG Workflow, Profits
Impressions interviewed apparel decorators from all corners of the industry to discuss the promise and the real-world results of investing in digital inkjet-to-garment printers. 
Since its introduction to the decorated apparel industry several years ago, direct-to-garment printing has been heralded as a game-changer — a disruptive technology that would dramatically change the way shops conduct business. It would allow decorators to tackle small orders, suppliers said. It would let shops offer personalization and print photographs with amazing detail, they promised. And it would dramatically reduce set-up time, they’ve claimed.
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