We purchased a Brother GTX machine and it is awesome. It is a DTG machine, what is called “Direct to Garment.”  For those of you not in the industry, it prints a shirt with a special textile ink in full color. The Brother GTX is one of the first DTG machines that really can handle not printing 24/7 without clogging up. Despite the claims of the manufacturers really any previous machine has had issues when not used all the time, but not this one. The reproduction is very good, in particular for what we want,  since what we want is prints that are similar to screenprinting.

We mainly got it to do on-demand orders for our customers’ stores and for very short runs, but it has proven even more of a benefit to our screenprinting. Let me explain:

We are currently in an annual race to finish thousands of shirts in time for the benefit concert for  Farm Aid (farmaid.org)  We have a dozen designs or more to quickly turn and we really want the absolute best looking prints and we don’t want even one mistake. So traditionally we do a mock up for initial approval, but even the best of us can’t always visualize what will happen on a real shirt never mind when a real person wears that real shirt. So we usually set up, print a sample, and send the client photos of a close up, a long shot, and of a person wearing it. Imagine then when that nine color design looks too big? ugh… This year we printed all the shirts DTG. DTG does not without lots of fussing (and sometimes even with lots of fussing) look exactly like what the screenprint will look like, but it is close enough, very close actually  With these DTG samples the size, placement, and basic color issues are all resolved before we ever shoot screens. You may not be able to tweak the red 185C but you can tell if red isn’t going to work at all.

We have saved hours of time and a whole ton of aggravation by doing the preliminary test prints DTG and then were able to quickly move through the approval process when we got to screenprinting with no big delays.

And if that isn’t enough, this Brother GTX machine is very affordable, and then if that isn’t enough, right now the GTX is available for 0% down and 0% interest. Contact their dealer Hirsch about it. They  included installation, pre-treat machine, training, and then we also were able to send for free a couple people to be even more thoroughly trained on everything about the machine.