A very special guest post from our friend Brett at Printed Threads: The garment industry has done a really great job of making shirts harder and harder to print on. The ink industry is trying to keep up with them. Dealing with dye migration on poly garments has become fairly easy because we are used…
At the FESPA world trade show in Munich a month or so ago I got a shirt at the Matsui ink booth. Being a movie fan and a baseball fan I was intrigued. As a screenprint fan I was perhaps not so intrigued. The print is impressive for a 100% poly shirt, but the halftones…
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…
We recently mocked up a job on lime green shirts with white ink. Not super high contrast but it looked ok. The customer approved the mock up, and the customer had seen the blank shirts in this color before. We printed the job and the customer was unhappy at the lack of contrast. We could…
In case you hadn’t heard, the Golden State Warriors once again became NBA Champs last week. With a hot-market printing contract in place we were tasked to print through the night and deliver upwards of 40k units within 24 hours. So, when Game 5 came to an end last Monday with a Warriors win, the…
“Made in America” is a highly relevant topic to our industry as well as a charged political issue. This piece from Mic offers some explanation as to what it really means when a brand says it’s “Made in America”… https://mic.com/articles/178430/what-it-really-means-when-a-brand-says-its-made-in-america#.jgO1NWShv
If you’ve engaged in “hot market” printing, specifically for MLB or NBA in which championships are determined by the winner of a best of seven series, you understand the anxiety and significant effort which goes into preparing your print shop for each potential series clinching game; adjusting your regular production schedule, setting up multiple presses,…
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…
PolyOne, manufacturer of Wilflex inks, is purchasing Rutland inks. This is big news if you use ink (which would be most of you). Details to follow.
