Traditional screen printing is a very old but proven process for printing t-shirts.  the quality is great but you still need to burn multiple 'screens' and squeegee ink through each one to get a multi-color design.  Thus, there is A LOT of physical set-up for a screenprint run.  This is why screenprinters impose minimum order sizes….so they can spread the cost of their time to set the machine up over a lot of t-shirts.

 

DTG or direct-to-garment printing came out a few years ago as a way to avoid this set-up.  They are essentially inkjet printers but the paper is a t-shirt.  The big problem is printing white ink.  For a whole host of technical reasons that I don’t even fully understand, white ink must have plastic in it in order to adhere to a t-shirt.  Since inkjet printers use printheads with tiny nozzles, pushing ink with plastic in it through a print head is difficult and creates a residue which ‘gums up’ the print head making it inoperable.

 

Anyway, a company named Kornit came out with a really expensive alternative a few years back which the VC funded companies like cafepress, zazzle, etc bought to produce single unique t-shirts.  Now Brother has come out with a less expensive alternative.  We are excited to see it in action and hope to offer dark colored t-shirts and sweatshirts soon.  Below is a video someone took at the recent SGIA show:

We dropped our DTG print prices and t-shirts dramatically last week.  A single Hanes Beefy-T with a full front, full color print is now $6.96!

 

The reason for the drop in prices is mainly due to the seasonality of t-shirts combined with the economic slowdown. 

It seems Brother has come out with a prototype machine that can print white! .....ie now folks can offer dark color t-shirts without having to screenprint them in a traditional manner.  Other folks have machines like this but they are either unreliable or cost a few hundred thousand dollars (what cafepress and zazzle use).

still to be determined how well it prints but we're excited.