In my previous post I mentioned that I was doing some research into tee shirt printing options for Dufur. After weeks of reading, talking to people and analyzing how I was planning to operate this venture, I made the decision to purchase a direct-to-garment (DTG) printer. Why?  The biggest reason for me was the ability to print very short runs — one or two shirts at a time, with great quality, low labor requirements and a reasonable variable cost.  And those were really my top criteria.  Oh yeah, and the added criteria that I don’t want and can’t afford to hold a large inventory of printed shirts. Instead, I want to have a lot of towns available and be able to print any one on demand.

When I evaluated screen printing, it scores really high on quality but lower on time & cost when the production quantity is super low. Given that this is an internet business where the most common order will be 1 shirt, that’s a problem. For me, the choices really came down to some kind of heat transfer approach and DTG. In terms of up-front investment, the heat transfer approach would be more attractive and I connected with several vendors who could supply me with quality transfers in the colors and designs I wanted. The 2 negatives for me were (1) production labor to print each shirt, and (2) managing an inventory of transfers in order to ensure short turnaround times for orders. Because most of my designs feature a town name in letters, there are many spaces that need “weeding.” In the parlance of the transfer process, this means removing the areas in the middle of the letters or design where you want the shirt fabric to show through. So, for example, the “Boring” shirt would need weeding to take out the inside spaces of the “B” and the “o” and the “g” before the transfer is adhered to the shirt. Not a huge deal, but an extra step that would get tedious if you were doing dozens of shirts a day. And for shirts like “Bonanza” with the wagon-wheel “o,” it’s a lot of little weeds to pull.

So, I bought a lightly used Anajet DTG printer that prints using 8 CMYK print cartridges. There are many brands of DTG printers and maybe in a future post I will walk through the 2nd half of this decision process, which was “which printer to pick.” So far I’ve been pleased with the printer and very happy with the output. I’ve wash-tested many shirts through dozens of washes and the shirts hold the colors really well. I even printed a bunch of shirts with the white ink option and after 20+ washes they still look good. (I’m printing mostly on American Apparel 100% cotton shirts). The folks at Anajet have been easy to deal with and the on-site training course I attended at their headquarters in LA was useful, but the best learning has come from printing a lot of shirts. Now my friends are all walking around wearing my test shirts…