The Ink Kitchen

Danny Sweem was just named CEO of M&R, replacing founder Rich Hoffman who will stay on during the transition time. Look for more reporting on this in coming weeks. What follows is the resume type facts about Danny Sweem. Let me say that I’ve known him for almost 25 years and he is one of…

The Gildan financial report on the year 2017, 4th quarter 2017, and the outlook for 2018 are available for your perusal here. A few take-aways from a quick look see: – They made a boatload of money. Gross sales of $2,750.8 million and generated free cash flow of $519 million. That’s a whole lot of…

Gildan has decided to close their garment dyeing facility in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Gildan bought the plant from Comfort Colors in 2015. It will close now as of February 28th, 2018 and 90 workers there will lose their jobs. The facility originally was opened in 1995 in a cavernous former armaments factory by the then…

Finally… a conference designed for us by us.  ThreadX is for business owners and managers seeking insights on the current state of and the future of the decorated apparel industry.  Top-notch speakers, including Johnny Cupcakes!

At the end of January 2017 there was a major fire in the Huntsman plant in Pori in Finland. Despite the dramatic photos of this clearly very large fire, luckily there were no reported injuries or deaths. This plant produces a large portion of the titanium dioxide in the world used in white printing inks.…

PolyOne Corporation, the company that owns Wilflex Inks, recently bought Rutland Plastic Technologies. This gives PolyOne ownership of the companies supplying ink to a majority of garment printers in the USA.  Last week I had a chat with the General Manager of Wilflex and now also of Rutland. Our chat reinforced some of the obvious…

This is the media advisory from PolyOne about the purchase of Rutland. Not particularlyly revealing, but seems to be all anyone has on this for now on this big industry news. My only other take on this is that there is a possibility of Wilflex taking a longer view on the business in terms of relationships…

WWD and other sources are reporting that yesterday January 12, 2017 the bankruptcy judge in the American Apparel case approved the sale of most of the assets (including the Brand) to Gildan. The entire sale to Gildan was 103 million dollars of which $15 million was for the purchase of inventory. Gildan was the highest…

Hirsch is now distributing Brother DTG machines, coast to coast. They already sell Kornit DTG machines, so they become the go-to place for high end fast pace DTG printing. There is no press release yet and the details will be coming in the coming weeks including if you stop by the HIrsch booth at Long…