ADVERTORIAL: The Perfect Match: E-Commerce and On-Demand Garment Decoration

September 28, 2010

The recent downturn of the economy may prove to be an unlikely force in future growth of the direct-to-garment printing industry. Garment decorators everywhere are rethinking the traditional way of producing high quality decorated garments. Today’s customers are ordering smaller and smaller quantities to improve their inventory turns and control spending. Even large box stores are ordering in lots of twelve or six pieces. These new ordering trends have made traditional screen printers reexamine their operating methods, procedures and costs. When it comes to setting up a screen print carousel to deliver dozens of short run orders, every time a small quantity order is taken to respond to the demands of their customers, each order becomes less profitable.

Every manufacturer now has the daunting task of seeking out new, smarter and more efficient ways to produce their product. The need to reduce operating costs, maintain smaller inventories and at the same time attempt to grow their business has never been more apparent. With this being said, the impact of e-commerce matched with on-demand digital printing in the decorated apparel industry has never been more important than it is today.

When a manufacturer today can advertise their capabilities to the entire planet through the World Wide Web, rather than service only a local demographic, this can dramatically increase the opportunities for success. With that potential you must be prepared to handle an influx of work from a global economy. You need to be able to automate the process of taking and tracking orders as much as possible to keep your operating costs in check and maximize profitability. By working with an online design program, you can give your customers the ability to design their own graphics or upload your company’s designs and add individual personalization to make each purchase unique.

E-commerce and the ability to design one off garments is a dream come true to customers. But the processing and producing of those garments can be a nightmare for the printer unless you are printing digitally where you can queue a stream of limitless one off designs seamlessly to your direct to garment digital printers.

Automation of your e-commerce site, which translates into limiting human interaction with the preparation of files, printing, order tracking and billing, is essential in preparing and processing the large amount of orders that can be generated by an e-commerce business. Minimizing the amount of time spent on each order will greatly increase the number of images that can be processed each hour, but this automation will necessitate a powerful website.

Mr. Kevin Kelly, owner of Blue Heron Industries Inc. of Little Falls, N.J., got involved with Wilcom DecoNetwork during much earlier versions of the software. After being a beta tester for a year and a half, Kelly operates a seamless, highly productive online business that is continuously expanding to new geographical markets. "It has really fleshed out to be a state of the art solution for online marketing of decorated apparel. The development of the DecoNetwork software is fluid so the upgrades and new releases are pretty frequent at this point. I can tell you that they are very interested in getting feedback that pertains to real-life issues. Their goal is to be as user friendly for the customer and the subscriber as possible. The product offers really comprehensive front-end and back-end capabilities. The fulfillment center is the brain of the software that runs your business and it really does an incredible job. The back-end of the software controls the business side of the operation and it actually reduces the number of employees processing orders."

Kelly has also owned two Kornit Thunder 932 Direct-On-Garment printers since 2007. After years of sitting on the sidelines waiting for DTG technology to develop, Kelly decided it was time to get involved in DTG as an additional method of decorating. According to Mr. Kelly: “I realized that just being a screen printer was not enough. The handwriting was already on the wall and when NAFTA was passed I knew the industry would never be quite the same again. I intuitively knew that I needed to get into the industrial DTG market despite my aversion to the process as a career screen printer — it seemed less than natural but I did it anyway. That decision has proven to be both timely and lucrative."

When asked to compare his business before and after putting the Kornit-DecoNetwork solution on the job, Kelly says: "We are a different company. We have the three major custom T-shirt disciplines of decorating covered under one roof. We are adding customers at a rate that is like nothing we have ever experienced."

For the smaller business owners that now sell only to a local specialized market and for the larger businesses as well, with the right marketing, e-commerce provides the vehicle to change your business from what may be a seasonal, local business, to a year-round business with an unlimited client base. With DecoNetwork as your e-commerce solution you can easily track trends in sales and marketing. You can monitor the colors and styles of garments along with the designs that are selling and separate the hot items from items that are not selling. You can add more “virtual” styles and designs to pre-test your ideas before ever producing a single print, saving you hundreds of dollars per design.

This leads us back to finding smarter ways to not only produce your products but finding smarter ways to save money. By watching these market trends and by printing on demand you can purchase smaller quantities of product, freeing up more of your capital for other investments or necessities.

To find out more about selling online visit www.deconetwork.com.



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