Custom screen printing in the U.S. alone is a $12.8 billion industry. Business is good, but growth doesn’t mean we’ve solved our fundamental problems. Here are some Hard-Won Wisdoms for Garment Decorators worth remembering. The Lies “You can save $5 a gallon on cheaper emulsion.” Evaluate emulsion by your production numbers and ease of use,…
You can read the fourth quarter results that Gildan posted here. However, in plain English, here’s what they’re actually saying — and what it might mean for printers, decorators, and promo folks. What Happened? Gildan bought Hanes. That makes them a much bigger company. No surprise there. The fourth-quarter numbers look huge because Hanes was…
Back in the days when dinosaurs ruled the earth about 1992 to be exact, we printed a very difficult print for the times. It was a full color CMYK process print of the clock tower in Lawrence. It is the kind of print that made us develop simulated process seps as process printing is very…
The Noise Problem America has a gift for taking anything with mass-market potential and marketing it until it’s unrecognizable. Something real gets buried under so much hype that people stop listening. AI is deep in that cycle right now. Every product is “AI-powered.” Every ad promises transformation. Most of it is noise making AI workflow…
For this Throwback Thursday: Made in the U.S. A., Let’s take a look back and a look forward at Apparel Made in the U.S. A.: Unionwear: Thriving in a New Manufacturing Landscape Unionwear, located in Newark, NJ, remains the real deal in union-made, USA-made hats, bags, and accessories. Their president Mitch Cahn continues to be…
We print mostly on material made from plants, and it is sewn and printed by living, breathing human beings. All of that means our work includes some diversity and is absolutely full of imperfections. On the other hand, we are faced with customers operating with their perfect (actually not perfect) Pantone books, icy close stares,…
If you are following along, I have been posting about my Print Order AI tool. I have been working on Establishing Flash Rules from Production Data for about 2.5 weeks. Flash placement, so far, is one of the hardest things to codify in screen printing automation. Unlike base-first or white-last rules, flash cures don’t appear…
Ask a screen printer where the image goes on a shirt and you’ll get a deceptively simple answer: wherever it looks good to the customer. But “looks good” is where things get complicated, and where expensive mistakes happen if you’re not careful. Templates Are Guides, Not Gospel Some shops rely on elaborate placement systems. Some…
°FAI: AI Image Resolution Upscaling for Print: Using Topaz Gigapixel, Photoshop Generative Upscale & DALL-E for Production-Ready Artwork I spend some of my days making and/or taking others AI-generated artwork and making it production-ready. This means upscaling images from typical 1024×1024 outputs to print-quality resolutions of 300 DPI or higher, cleaning up artifacts that become…
Poly White vs. Low Bleed White: If you’ve been in screen printing long enough, you’ve watched the dye migration battle escalate, and our options for overcoming it, grow. So What’s the Difference? Here’s the breakdown. Low-bleed white covers any white ink engineered to resist dye migration. Manufacturers originally created these inks for 50/50 cotton-poly blends,…
