5 Things to Know Before Buying dtg ink

1) Don’t Go All in at Once

One of the best parts of Direct to Garment printing is that you can run it in a small space. Setups in home garages and spare bedrooms are common and allow for orders to be fulfilled without the need to pay rent. A printer, heat press, and a hand sprayer for pretreat are all that you immediately need. These don’t take much space and, with luck, you can find them for $10,000 or less. Additionally, DTG can be completely successful as an ecommerce Small quantities of custom orders are where DTG printing shines and many owners of these machines won’t bother with having a physical store to sell their own designs.

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Of course, this assumes that your business will even have room for DTG. While veterans of garment decoration need a reliable source for small orders, owners of clothing brands are better off avoiding the cost of equipment for as long as they can. There are many companies that will ship your shirts directly to your customer, with no need for you to do more than make an account and find sales. If you are the owner of a clothing brand, the best advice for you is to focus on selling and designing. You can worry about buying equipment later.

2) White Ink Settles Anywhere That it Sits

Ink settling is the cause of most maintenance problems in Direct to Garment printing. However, most DTG initiates don’t understand all of the problems that this can cause. Printer manufacturers always tell their customers to shake their white ink. Unfortunately, what new owners don’t always understand is that white ink will settle in your lines, dampers, and filters if you don’t use or clean your printer often. When you let it sit overnight, you will see a poor quality white on your first couple prints in the morning. If your printer isn’t used for a few days, you may see clogs and the need to replace parts. Additionally, bags and cartridges need to be shaken constantly or your print quality will suffer.

3) Used Printers Almost Always Have Problems

Buying a used printer is one of the most common reasons you'll see DTG owners asking for tech support. The sellers of these machines typically let the printers sit unused and un-maintained. If ink was in the printer, you can expect any and all of the previously mentioned settlement problems. You will still see broken parts if Cleaning Solution, water, or no fluid was left in the lines as a result of previously lubricated parts becoming dry.

Overall, you should avoid used printers unless you know what you’re getting into. If you can see the printer in action or receive a written guarantee, the printer may be worth your time. Additionally, some veteran users will come to your shop to repair broken down printers for less than the cost of buying new. Other companies also sell refurbished printers, which is comparable to the quality you can expect from new machines. The important thing is to find what will fit your budget, but still let you begin printing and making your money back right away.

4) Pretreatment Settings Aren’t Standard

Not all shirts are created equal. You will need to adjust settings when changing between shirt brands and colors if you want consistent prints. This is true even for pretreatment. If you lay down a single amount of pretreat for all colors and all brands, you will lose image quality and wash fastness. FIREBIRD typically suggests using more pretreatment on lower quality and darker shirts. Less is needed for higher quality and lighter colors.

The easiest way to adjust the amount of pretreatment used is with an automatic sprayer. However, even these expensive machines lack standard settings. You may be surprised to know that your own machine has no check for how much pretreat is put on the shirt. While auto sprayers have numbers indicating the amount of pretreatment applied, they are only showing “more” or “less”. Additionally, many sprayers have not been calibrated, so two of the same brand may spray different amounts with the same settings. The only way to really understand your settings is to do your own tests. This brings us to our final, most important point.

5) The Most Successful Printers do Their Own Tests

No two shirt shops are identical. Your exact combination of shirts, printers, and even climate affect everything you print. Because of this, experimenting is key. We suggest performing wash tests on any garment that you bring into your setup. You should also keep notes on the ink and pretreatment settings that you used on your best prints.

FIREBIRD has specific issues to look out for included in our other posts. Below is simply a bit of general DTG advice to help you get started with your testing.

• If your shirt washes poorly, pay attention to how the image came off. Different problems cause different wash issues. 
• Polyester needs special handling to work with DTG. This includes blends, sweatshirts, and any “neon” or “safety” colored shirts.
• Red shirts discolor from heat. This will fade as the shirt cools and there is no reason to worry.
• Too much pretreatment is likely to stain and wash poorly. Too little pretreatment will suffer from poor print quality and wash out. Try to find the “sweet spot” for colors and brands.

A handful of our clients are designers and entrepreneurs researching DTG printing as a way to print full color custom t-shirts for customers or to start up a new clothing brand. No doubt, direct-to-garment printing is one very cool technique of printing t-shirts that hosts a diverse set of benefits for consumers:

– full color options
– suitable for small batches
– minimal upfront investment
– quick turnaround

Large numbers of online t-shirt printing companies such as Zazzle and Cafepress rely on DTG printing for small orders such as individual shirts. Since our small online print company primarily focuses on cheap short run printing, DTG printing is a perfect way for us to complement current digital offerings while growing revenue. I was super psyched at first when we received our DTG machine, but there was a lot of headache in the beginning that I never could have imagined despite thorough research ahead of time (t-shirtforums.com is a good place to start although it is very unorganized).

Contact us to discuss your requirements of dtg ink. Our experienced sales team can help you identify the options that best suit your needs.

I don’t want to divulge exactly what DTG machine we purchased since most of the below list reveals industry wide, and accepted, issues that may be unknown to any newcomer, yet is common knowledge to experienced professionals. I will disclose this though:  We basically have an entry level machine capable of printing two to four shirts at one time.

5 Things You Should Know Before Buying A DTG Machine

1. The cost per shirt is expensive. Each DTG vender markets inaccurate cost-per-shirt numbers since they choose to only include the direct cost of successfully consumed ink. Our inks cost around $300 per liter which is hefty in itself, but ink is often wasted. For instance, each day we must perform one or two nozzle checks consuming precious ink. Dark colored shirts require pretreatment which costs an inflated $90 per gallon (optimistically good for maybe 500 to shirts). Recommended flushing and cleaning solutions and small parts required for routine daily, weekly and monthly maintenance can become profit margin eaters. These “direct” costs also don’t consider labor, utilities, supplies, etc. However, small shirt orders warrant higher individual shirt prices which can still lead to decent profit margins, but managing the expenses can become overwhelming.

2. You need at least two heat presses. Most DTG vendors will recommend that you buy at least one heat press, but this will likely become a bottleneck for production. Curing a shirt properly takes three minutes and pretreated shirts require 30 to 45 additional seconds. I personally like to heat up a shirt 5 to 10 seconds before even getting started for flattening purposes and for evaporating unwanted existing chemicals. While a shirt is curing, it is nice to be able to continue the pretreatment process and will save tons of labor even for smaller facilities.

3. Maintenance is required. Every single day, the DTG machine must be cleaned. Each vendor has its own procedures that are very similar. Nozzle checks, head cleanings, print head cleanings, ink level checks, flushing and more are continuous steps to maintaining a smooth printing process. The DTG machine is more finicky than any of our other digital printing machines which include wide format printers and digital production presses. I cannot stress enough how important maintenance is. I’ve personally had to recover a machine after an unclean operator failed to follow good care routines and it is a royal pain and source of great aggravation. You must accustom yourself to the working parts and places that consistently require attention or the printing experience will become insanely frustrating. If cleanliness is not in your nature, find another way to make money.

4. Support is mediocre. The more you print shirts, the less you will need support. Manuals and online documentation just aren’t always enough to help with certain problems. I cannot speak for all vendors, but ours recently launched a number of YouTube videos which made life much easier for me personally. However, support can often times be clunky, inconsistent and slow. Oh sure, some DTG support techs will read this and curse me, but when a call back takes more than 24 to 48 hours (if at all), or technicians sometimes provide opposing solutions or there is little online tracking of past support tickets (in our case NONE), I promise my complaints are rather justified. Not to mention, onsite service is normally unavailable or would cost anywhere from $500 to $ per visit. When our machine arrived with a faulty print head, the company still charged us $500 to visit our location to replace it. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike the company, but DTG is still in a rather primitive state and the support can be frustrating especially in a situation where a shirt project is due right away.

Weird stuff happens when printing on shirts with a DTG machine. Platens may need to be leveled, sensors adjusted, lines cleaned, streaking occurs, dirty prints appear etc. Even newcomers following maintenance guidelines are likely to run into numerous problems and support will become frustrating. Just stick with it and things will get better eventually.

5. Give it time. The less exposed to printing and graphics software an operator is, the longer it will take to learn and digest the ropes of DTG printing. Also, different shirts and graphics may require different RIP software settings which will lead to an enormous amount of waste in the first few weeks. For some new businesses, launching professional-grade production may take months. I recommend offering free shirts to family, friends and some customers to keep the machine running and to speed up the learning process. Understanding how to trim, size and crop using Adobe Photoshop is an absolute requirement.

The below video is an example of a DTG machine printing on black shirts. Most DTG machines (like this one) can print on light and dark shirts by adding a white ink base.

This next image showcases the detail that can be reached with DTG printing.

Conclusion

Printing on garments like t-shirts using a DTG machine is rewarding, but watching profitability will always be a concern especially with entry level models. At first, the experience might be frustrating, but strictly following maintenance procedures and practicing will lead to high quality printed graphics and happy customers.

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