We continue to cover different facets of the direct-to-garment printing business, because we’re seeing such a massive growth in the industry. This growth is primarily due to the custom e-commerce business, which is currently the fastest-growing segment of the blank T-shirt industry. We are seeing new websites popping up by the hundreds that provide customers the ability to customize garments down to the single piece. But once that order is placed, where do all those tees get printed? Well, a significant amount of them (about 15,000 per day to be exact!) are printed at The Dream Junction, one of the biggest DTG printers in Southern California. Want to find out how to scale your DTG printing business? Read on for tips from a pro!
KEYS TO SUCCESSFULLY SCALING YOUR DTG PRINTING BUSINESS
Scaling a business doesn’t happen overnight, but it’s possible to build a massive operation in just a few years. The Dream Junction has been able to do just that. It all starts with an idea, finding a niche in the market and being able to take risks. The Dream Junction recognized an opportunity in the print market and went all in! The Dream Junction attributes their success to three key elements: using the right plain tees and garments, utilizing the right equipment and taking advantage of the right technology.
SCALE YOUR DTG PRINTING BUSINESS BY USING THE RIGHT GARMENTS
When you’re printing thousands of T-shirts per day, the garments need to be consistent, mainly because there’s no time to go through each box and analyze each shirt. With DTG printing, a blank hoodie, t-shirt, or other garment is pretreated, printed with a water-based ink then put through a dryer for a long period of time. That means, the quality and consistency of how it’s made is crucial. Dye migration is also something DTG printers deal with often. That means if the blank garment was cured at lower temperature than the inks need to be cured at, you’re going to run into dye migration.
“We love using BELLA+CANVAS at The Dream Junction. We get really excited when our print partners call out for us to use the BELLA+CANVAS brand. We know that we’re going to be opening a box and have the same consistency as in the boxes we ordered two years ago. We never have to worry about opening a white and seeing a yellow tinge on it, which we do with a lot of other companies. We also know that BELLA+CANVAS keeps a really strict standard of the ¼-inch policy where you don’t have to worry about one shirt being four inches longer than the next shirt in the next box,” said Blair, co-owner and CEO of The Dream Junction.
SCALE YOUR DTG PRINTING BUSINESS BY UTILIZING THE RIGHT EQUIPMENT
Churning out 15,000 shirts a day would not not be feasible without the right machine. A big factor to The Dream Junction’s success, is the fact that they use the Kornit Avalanche 1000… 11 of them to be exact! With those machines, all the production is done inline. Once the pickers get the shirt, it goes straight to the machine, it’s inline pretreated, the graphic is printed directly on it and then it’s dried. This is in comparison to other DTG systems that require five steps – pretreatment, heat press, dry, print and heat press/dryer cure – to produce the final product. Using Kornit, saves Dream Junction a significant amount of time!
SCALE YOUR DTG PRINTING BUSINESS BY TAKING ADVANTAGE OF THE RIGHT TECHNOLOGY
The team at The Dream Junction is able to do thousands of individual, unique designs a day. This is in large part due to the technology they use. As orders are being placed on e-commerce sites, they are sent, in real time, to The Dream Junction’s back-end system. Most of the time, those orders are printed same day. This extremely efficient system allows the company’s print partners to offer their customers complete customizable orders. The print partners are also able to track where the orders are in real time as they are being picked, printed, dried and shipped. The whole system is completely fluid and streamlined. It’s no wonder they have become so massive!
If you’re interested in learning more about how The Dream Junction has successfully scaled their DTG printing business, be sure to watch the video below, and comment with any questions you have!
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