Most small businesses need custom printed apparel for both marketing and uniform purposes. These garments offer you a chance to provide branded materials to staff, clients and prospects that paint the best possible picture of what your company does and, most importantly, what your company is about. It goes without saying that to make the best impression you want to be targeting the highest quality printed garment options that are both affordable and long lasting.
Screen printing is the best available option for small businesses, combining cost effectiveness, durability, and a quick-turn around time – three key qualities that businesses of all sizes are sure to looking for. Your small business may need custom printed garments for a variety of reasons, whether for uniforms, tradeshows, promotional items or any other custom branded garment.
What Types of Garment Printing Are There?
It can be easy to get confused when shopping your options, especially online. A lot of sites throw around different printing terms without ever explaining what they mean (which is why at Artik, we take you right behind the scenes.) If you’ve been getting turned around when trying to find the best print supplier for your business, here is a quick guide to what you’ve probably been seeing:
- Screen Printing: Uses ink and screens to print shapes and logos onto the fabric of a garment, which is then heat cured to seal the design. (Get more information on the process here!)
- Digital Transfer Printing: Design is digitally printed on special permanent transfer material, the design shape is cut and heat pressed onto the garment. The applied transfer is a heavier option, though the easiest way to print many colours without too much setup costs and to achieve photorealism.
- Vinyl Printing: Cuts vinyl shapes out of a coloured roll of vinyl material, these shapes are then heat pressed onto garment. Each colour needs its own individual pressing, and like Digital Transfer Printing, makes for a heavier final product. Most often used for individual name and numbers on sports jerseys.
- Direct to Garment Printing: Prints an image directly into the fabric of a garment using a modified inkjet style printer (yes, just like the one on your desk!) This produces a great quality item, but the technology is still too new to be truly effective. The shirts have to be pre-treated with special chemicals and the printing process is slow. It takes extra work to print on anything other than white, and can only produce 10 t shirts an hour.
So which of these types of printing is right for your business? If maximizing profits by keeping costs low is your goal, while still delivering a superior printed garment, screen printing is most certainly the option for you. Here’s why:
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Screen Printing is FAST
Screen printing is by far the fastest way to print onto garments. The quantity of garments printable in an hour on an automatic machine ranges from 300 to 600, based on the number of colours and complexity of the design. No other form of printing can achieve this speed of production while maintaining a high level of quality.
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Screen Printing is DURABLE
Proper curing of screen printed garments can make the print extremely durable, potentially lasting longer than the garment itself. Other forms of printing, most namely digital transfer printing, have the tendency to fade, crack, and peel over time and washes.
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Screen Printing is COST EFFECTIVE
The beauty of screen printing is that once the initial setup for a design is completed (a one time cost per run), the whole run can be printed to those exact specifications without any additional fees. The more items you order, the more cost effective screen printing becomes – for example, with digital printing the price per piece will always be about the same, which makes it an expensive option for anything more than several items. With screen printing, the more garments you print, the more the setup cost gets spread across each item, and the lower your cost gets.
Screen Printing Really is Your Best Option as a Small Business Owner
Whether you’re looking for uniforms for your staff, t shirts for a charity walk, or swag to give away at a tradeshow, if you want your customized tees match your Clarks shoes, when you’re printing branded garments, screen printing is definitely the way to go. Just remember that not all print shops were created equal – to get the best results, make sure you pick an experienced printer who knows their stuff.
If you’d like some more details on what you need to know before placing an order for screen printed apparel, check out some of the other topics we’ve covered like automatic vs. manual printing and how ink and color affect your product, or talk to one of our representatives by calling 1-866-909-9161 or 416-815-7770. You can always visit us online, too, at www.artik.com.