How to Maximize Digital Direct-to-Garment Production

A high level of organization and developing techniques specific to your shop are two keys to improving digital production. August 29, 2011
By Kevin Kelly, Contributing Writer

To be profitable at any apparel-decorating process, your shop must be set up so the layout and workflow are as efficient and productive as possible, and this certainly holds true for digital direct-to-garment production. If your shop is smaller and does onesie-twosie orders, then speed won’t be a big issue. However, if you are approaching direct-to-garment printing from an industrial perspective, you need to be concerned with fractions of minutes in production time.

In your pursuit of speed, you also must endeavor not to sacrifice quality; speed won’t matter much when you start losing customers. So the ultimate goal is to find that balance between the efficiency of speed and quality.

Before I brought in my first digital printer, I did some research and put a lot of thought into where I would house my digital equipment. For direct-to-garment printing, you should have a dedicated, clean area for your machine. You can’t put it in the same area as your screen printing presses because you need control over the heat and humidity; and you shouldn’t put it near your embroidery equipment due to lint.

Our digital printers use phthalate-free, water-based inks, which are sensitive to the environment. I custom built a 1,200-square-foot room inside of a 2,300-square-foot room and planned for enough space to add five more machines if needed. Although these rooms aren’t air conditioned, we continuously pump in cool air and keep the humidity ramped up.

To prevent the dryers from heating up this area, we positioned the gas ovens outside of the room, which is heat shielded except for the residual that comes off the belt. So we have only the feed belt of the dryer accessible to that room. Typically, if you run a gas oven at 250,000 BTUs, you’ll heat up any room by 25˚F to 30˚F within two hours.

Our dryer is a return-feed type. The operator places shirts on the top belt and cured shirts return to the same operator on the bottom level. The dryer belt is positioned between the two printers. Each operator can remove a shirt from a pallet and take half a step to put the shirt on the belt.

It’s also important to have a dedicated dryer for your digital production. It’s not production friendly to run screen printing inks simultaneously with direct-to-garment inks because one is plastisol, the other is water-based and they require different belt speeds.

Design & Printing Details
Most of our direct-to-garment printing involves moderate-size full-front and neck prints. Lately, we’ve done a lot of branding on the back of the neck. We love this print location because it’s smaller than the left chest and is roughly 30% more profitable than a front print on the same shirt.

Our neck prints often are one-color designs. But even in our full-color neck prints, the design typically is so small that there are very few indexes of the print heads, so the print time is significantly reduced. If we print at standard production speed, we can print in excess of 100-dozen shirts per day if the designs are not too large. But if we ramp up to high speed, we can increase production by about 13%. With our industrial equipment, we can alter the machine parameters that control electronic functions, such as frequency.

Our machines allow us to alter the electronic frequency that controls speed. We run mostly at standard frequency, or 10,000 KHz. But we can set the machines as high as 15,000 KHz, which is 50% faster. However, we can do this only with certain jobs, such as left-chest prints or single-color designs — otherwise we sacrifice quality. We never print at high speed for darks; we run slower to ensure a better-quality print.

Also, there are pros and cons of a dual-platen vs. a single-platen machine. Although some people disagree, I don’t think the number of pallets on the machine matters. If you have two single-platen machines vs. one dual platen, you can still produce orders if a machine goes down, as opposed to having production shut down for the day when one of the machines needs repair. However, dual-pallet machines actually will use less ink in the long term because the print heads are in constant motion; thus, they are spitting and purging less.

Educate Operators
When it comes down to it, your business is only as good as your employees. For every job we run, our machine operators know when they can and can’t push their machines to high speeds. We also have trained our operators to start printing with the highest volume and work down to the lowest volume.

In production, organization is key and results in an efficient workspace. We remind our operators to keep their tables clean, set aside their coffee, keep their paperwork accessible, put tools back where they found them, etc. Our office and warehouse staff understands that attention to detail is critical to the operator’s success, and this all makes for satisfied customers.

We also train our operators on our basic curing principle for the gas ovens: 7 minutes for dark goods and 4.5 minutes for white goods. Only about 10% of what we print is on straight white T-shirts. So, to be efficient, we often set aside one day to print all the white orders and knock out considerable volume in one shot.

We’re also lucky in that all of our operators are artists on the side, so they have a working knowledge of Adobe Photoshop and how the processes are ripped. Good file prep is critical to maximizing efficiency in your shop. But if an issue arises, our operators can walk into the art room and correct files without having to ask.

Our operators also load, unload, fold and box the product. Then, they pass along the goods to our shipping employee, who checks the product against the order and counts the items. Unlike in screen printing, we don’t need a loader/unloader dryer person, so we save on salary costs.

Managing Orders
Nowadays, many businesses rely not only on walk-in customers, but also on Internet orders. Many online orders for custom T-shirts are for less than 12 shirts. We can receive hundreds of them each week and managing that portion of the business takes a lot of coordination. These small orders take a lot of man hours of pulling and separating goods. We’re always looking at ways to be more efficient, but if you have to separate out 350 shirts to print 75 orders, it takes time.

After a customer places an online custom T-shirt order, we download and prep the art. One of the most important aspects in creating a successful order flow in online decorating is your art room. My art director, Matt Fox, and I have developed systems to handle volumes of art. We have created a series of custom RIPS to aid in this process.

Once the orders are prepped in the art area, they are tagged as “complete” in that department. The paperwork flows out to the warehouse, where the goods are put in a bin, which is placed on a rolling rack.

The operators follow a schedule that indicates how many of the racked orders they have to complete in a certain time period. We batch large orders together and break down small orders and schedule them back to back. This makes it more efficient, and we can satisfy many customers in a short period of time.

Achieving peak efficiency has been a trial-and-error process at my shop, and I continue to look for ways to improve. Hopefully, some of the procedures I am using will make sense for your shop — or at least be a good starting point as you evolve your own techniques for maximizing productivity.

Kevin Kelly has been involved in decorated apparel for more than 34 years. He opened his current business, Blue Heron Industries Inc., in Little Falls, N.J., in 2002. Blue Heron offers volume screen printing, embroidery and direct-to-garment services. For more information or to comment on this article, e-mail Kevin at kkelly@goblueheron.com or visit goblueheron.com.



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