At PRINTING United in Las Vegas, I stood at the DuPont booth with Steve Harpold of Brown Manufacturing Group. He walked me through the Yet-Tee, an automated DTF line. This year it runs DuPont’s Artistri JA1100 Jettable Adhesive. The goal, in his words, is a one-operator process. Here’s the rundown, and how it differs from the DTF most shops run today.

Throwback: How DTF Works Now

Most shops still run DTF as a chain of separate steps. Print the film. Powder it. Shake it. Cure it. Cut it. Then a person presses it onto a shirt. I covered the basics in Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about DTF and DTF and DTG: What Are They and When Do You Use Each?.

Every handoff adds labor and error. When I dug through five years of Shirt Board threads for TBT: DTF Problems, the same complaints kept coming back. White ink killed printheads. Humidity caused undercure. Peel windows and press marks ate time. Shops also undercounted the labor at the press.

Automation has already started on that last problem. Impressions recently named pressing the DTF bottleneck. It pointed to the ROQ IMPRESS and the Hotronix carousel as answers. In February, DecoNetwork described a powder version, the Yet-Tee that pulls transfers from a connected printer, cuts, powders, cures, places and presses. I also tracked the wider transfer market in TBT: Heat Transfer Technology in 2026.

What Is Different Now

The big change is the adhesive. Standard DTF sprinkles TPU powder on wet ink. Instead, DuPont’s system jets a liquid adhesive through the printer. DuPont and Brown announced the partnership at the Apparel Decoration Summit in Nashville in June.

Steve described a six-head printer: two heads for adhesive, two for white and two for color. As a result, it lays down everything in one pass. The machine then flips the print and cuts it. Next, it runs the transfer through the dryer, flips it again and places it on the shirt. Finally, it peels the carrier and post-presses.

The operator’s job starts with a scan. The scan assigns the artwork to that shirt. Then the routing software picks the printer that will get the shirt back fastest. Each press has its own time and temperature. Rules drive those settings, and Steve said they can change by artwork or by customer. For example, a shop could set ink levels per customer.

Powder Didn’t Disappear

Steve said the jettable adhesive works best on 50/50 and higher cotton blends. Polyester is another story. “It’s the migration problem all over again,” he said. So the Yet-Tee keeps powder as an option. An operator can run jettable, jettable, poly, jettable, and the machine turns powder on for the poly shirt.

That matters. Shops don’t print one fabric all day. A line that switches per garment fits a high-mix order better than a line that forces one chemistry.

The Numbers

Steve said Brown targets 60 to 80 units an hour with one printer. Two printers target 120 to 150. A third printer pushes it near 200. After that, he expects diminishing returns.

Note one thing, though. DecoNetwork’s February piece quoted 80 to 120 garments an hour on one printer for the powder version. I don’t know why the numbers differ. It could be the adhesive, or the garment mix.

Questions I Still Have

First, printhead care. My DTF research showed white ink as the top in-house failure. Now two more heads jet adhesive. I want to know the maintenance plan for those heads.

Second, wash testing. DuPont claims a softer hand and durable transfers. However, the announcements I found published no wash data.

Still, the direction is right. DTF’s pain was never the print. The Yet-Tee goes after that labor issue directly. Now, if we can just replace that transfer film.