technical advances in textiles

The rapidly evolving world of digitally printed textiles is a reflection of several unique and contrasting business models that create challenges, threats and opportunities to the future of the textile printing market.
The traditional textile industry looks at it from their traditional mass production business models and complains it is too slow and too expensive relative to the conventional screen printing technologies most commonly used in the market today. For these companies, digital textile printing has proven to be a tremendous cost savings in sampling only, while moving to conventional methods for their mass production needs.
With textile seminars and exhibits being presented on in increasingly frequent basis at wide format printing and graphics trade shows, it is apparent that other industries are looking at this technology with an eye towards what it can do, as opposed to what it can't do. Since these industries already support short run and customization business models as a reflection of their technology driven businesses, textiles simply represent a new market to which they can sell their excellent command of printing technology as well as their ability to produce short run production with quick turn around - a business practice that is foreign to the conventional printing industry as a result of the analog technology on which it is founded.
So, is the wide format printing industry a threat to the conventional textile printing industry? Yes and no. If the textile industry waits for the technology to evolove in order to adopt it as a production tool, then yes, they will have lost many opportunities to new players. If, on the other hand, they can re-engineer their businesses to support the growing consumer demand for customized product, then they can lessen the probability of market errosion.
The wide format printers are not without their challenges to the new market opportunities. While most have mastered the basics of printing on paper, vinyl and even plastics, printing on textiles that vary in fiber content, weight, thickness, ink absorbency, and yarn size, that must be washable, light fast, crock resistant and wearable and require multiple ink sets can present a whole new set of challenges, if not at least a learning curve. Satisfying a textile industry that is accustomed to the color accuracy that spot color offers is yet another challenge.
With an eye towards the growing number of wide format printers, graphic artists and entrepreneurs that see the market opportunities, we offer a primer in digital textile printing