Going for Garment Gold

For polyester shirts or any plastics, such as name tags or golf bag tags, Brown and his team rely on a dye-sublimation system from Imprints USA, which the in-plant added approximately three months ago. Similar to Bucknell’s system, it includes a Ricoh digital printer to create transfer sheets and a heat press to seal the image into garments.

Dye-sub vs. Direct-to-garment Printing

Brown explains that if you could do strictly polyesters, the dye-sublimation system is an economical choice; it is faster and about one-third of the price of a direct-to-garment printer. However, Brown admits that the direct-to-garment printing probably costs a little less in the long run. The cost to purchase polyester shirts is substantially more than buying cotton shirts in bulk, and with polyester you’re limited in the color of shirts on which you can print.

“The key is that you sort of have to look around at the different materials and do testing until you really find one that you like,” Brown urges. “There are some shirts out there that are really soft [and] we just think that the softer the material is, the better it prints.”

If there is anything that Alvin Griffin has learned from adding garment printing, it is that there is a lot of trial and error to find out what works best, and that a smooth workflow comes with experience.

“The garment printing industry has really evolved in the last three or four years,” he says. “It is kind of complicated to make sure you have the right consumables here at the right time and you’re not overspending and getting into your profit margin by having a bunch of inventory sitting around. We’ve had to learn along the way.”