Mike Angel shares his expertise in apparel decorating, focusing on the cutting-edge technique called direct to film printing, or DTF printing for short. This method has completely revolutionized the world of apparel decorating, offering numerous advantages over traditional methods. It is not only faster and easier, but also more cost-effective and versatile.
With a DTF printer, you have the flexibility to take on both small and large-scale projects. You can effortlessly create and print the same design on a wide range of fabrics, allowing for endless possibilities in customization. Unlike other technologies, DTF transfers require lower temperatures and shorter press times, making it ideal for more delicate fabrics as well as durable fabrics.
DTF prints boast exceptional color and detail, surpassing many other apparel decorating methods for apparel decorating with photo-realistic images, and the prints are highly durable, withstanding stretching and washing with ease.
Transcript
Marc Vila:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Custom Apparel Startups podcast. And today, we have another special guest. We’ve invited on Mike Angel here from ColDesi, so thank you and welcome to the show. Would you just give everybody just a quick summary of what you do here at ColDesi?
Mike Angel:
All right. Thank you for having me, Marc. My name is Mike Angel and I head on-demand business development for ColDesi, and on-demand means all things e-commerce and all things with volumes as little as one, if that makes sense. What we concentrate on with on-demand is being able to sell products, digital printed products online, and also be able to produce them efficiently. That includes e-commerce technology, order management technology, as well as equipment like DTF printers, which are phenomenal for on-demand types of businesses.
Marc Vila:
There’s lots of 20s right now, right? So 2021, 2022 was really big. 2023 were really big jumps in the direct-to-film printing industry. And you’ve been in this industry 60 years or something like that?
Mike Angel:
Yeah, 572 years.
Marc Vila:
572 years. But in all seriousness, did you start in the ’90s? Or when did you start working in this industry?
Mike Angel:
In 1998.
Marc Vila:
1998, okay. So you’ve been in this industry about a decade longer than myself. And I feel like I know a lot so I’m throwing another decade of experience on that. I can only imagine all the things you’ve learned. And over the years, you’ve seen DTG printing come alive, embroidery machines evolve, white toner printing come in. But a lot of people are talking about how direct-to-film printing is different than a lot of those. And I’m just curious on what’s your opinion on is direct-to-film different than those and what is different about it?
Mike Angel:
Yeah, that’s a great question. So DTF, direct-to-film, is a game changer. I hate to use that term. Throughout the years, we’ve used that several times. But it truly is, and there are two things that are special about DTF. The first is it is its own thing in terms of the technical aspect of direct-to-film printing. In other words, the print itself. So it can be people try to compare it to vinyl or toner transfers or screen printing, but it truly is its own media medium. Medium?
Marc Vila:
Yeah, both.
Mike Angel:
Right?
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Because the media that it goes on is a specialty type of film, and the medium itself is actually what is being created is different than everything else.
Mike Angel:
Right. So technically, it’s a water-based pigment that has high washability. It has very vibrant look. The pigment can be profiled so it’s easily profiled to match customer color palettes. We’ve got 50 plus washes before you see degradation to the prints. You need a spectrophotometer to see it after 50 plus washes. We’ve had studies done at the Florida State University’s textile lab. It has a white ink backing which not only provides the opacity and gives the artwork pop, but provides the ability for the powdered adhesive to stick to. So basically what you have is a solidified ink, for lack of a better way to describe it. And that glue is what’s pressed on to any type of fabric.
So that is a combination that we haven’t seen before, to be able to take one printed piece of artwork and apply that same print across a wide variety of products. So anything, cotton, anything polyester. And that could go for apparel. It could go for just straight material. It could go for caps, soft-sided coolers. So you have your soft goods, backpacks. It’s unbelievable. It also has a low weld time, so it’s a very low time. You’re talking 7, 10 seconds worth of press time, and very low temperatures comparative to some of the other transfer systems. So at whether your cotton products, you’re up around 300 degrees to really get a good melt and weld and adhesion to the fabric. But if you’re on something a little more delicate like performance wear, which is very proper, you’re wearing a performance polo right now.
Marc Vila:
Miss that patches.
Mike Angel:
I’ll address that in a second why this is so significant, but you can then drop the temperature down at 270-ish, so there’s no dye migration or releasing from the substrate. And so right off the bat, technically you’ve got a beautiful print that’s stretchy, that feels good, and goes across a wide variety of products. And the transfers themselves don’t have a shelf life so you can pre-make some and store them without any issues as well. So very versatile.
The second thing that this all addresses is the ability to meet that on-demand process and philosophy we’ve been talking about. To be able to now profitably print one unit. That’s, to use the word again, game changer in the industry, to profitably be able to produce one unit. So you have a very low material cost as well. Material cost is around a half a cent per square inch. So a 10 by 10 piece of artwork’s going to run you at 50 cents or so, and you can produce it quickly. It can go across a wide variety of products.
And with that, you’re able to then sell as little as one product, hopefully through your web store. And the end customers will pay a premium for the ability to purchase just one for you because traditionally they haven’t been able to do that. You have minimum quantities, color requirements, how many color separations and all these requirements and setup fees and all sorts of things. But you can now produce as little as one unit profitably, get a premium for it, but also be able to scale with the same technology and produce many. So now you can produce redundant runs. So whether it’s 1 or whether it’s 1,000, you can do with the DTF system.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, and the setup time is pretty minimal for whether you’re doing 1 or 1,000. It’s literally going on a computer and typing in 1 or typing in 1,000 and hitting go.
Mike Angel:
True digital production.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. And so you said a lot of great things there so a few things popped in my head. One, you compared to some other technologies. So popular the technology for decades now is sublimation printing. It’s a great way to create a transfer and store it for a period of time and then place it on a piece of apparel or hard good or something like that. The problem with sublimation goods is you’re very limited on the materials and the colors and the materials that you can work with. So a ton of people are doing that technology and then they tell customers no when they want a dark blue shirt with a white logo on it because you literally cannot do that. So then alternatively, they’ll be screen printed or vinyl cut it, which has been again, another technology for decades which are both great and they look good and they wash well and all that stuff because their technology has been around forever.
The challenge is what I have right now is a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6-color logo. So for one, if a customer hands you this, you’re probably going to, if you’re doing one of those methods, your first instinct is probably to see if you can get them to reduce the number of colors because that’s more work for you. And you either have to charge them more for the work, do more work for less money than another customer, or convince them to do it in one color. Direct-to-film printing as a digital process, so it really doesn’t matter if it’s 1 color or 100, it’s the same amount of work. So that’s a wonderful change too to the business is the amount of colors and if there’s gradients or anything like that. For the most part you can just be, “Oh, sure. I can print that logo.”
And then we’ve got other technologies like DTG or white toner printing, which are digital processes that you don’t have to worry about colors. And the materials you’re going to print on, I don’t want to get too much in the weeds on those things but both of those are reasonably versatile to some degree. But the problem with those is just the time. So white toner printing and DTG printing, depending on what you’re printing, how large it is, et cetera, et cetera, can eat up a decent amount of time to get those printed. And it’s not a crazy amount of time, minutes, let’s just say, a few minutes, which is not that big of a deal, but times 100 is 300 minutes. That’s a decent amount of time to work.
Where on your direct-to-film printer, to do 300, you’re clicking print, it’s going through the process. You’re not having to do all your transfers one at a time at that point in time, you’re just going through the process and you’re doing other things in your shop while it’s printing 300 of these. And then when you’re done, you’re applying them to the shirts, like you said, 7 to 10 seconds at a time, versus other processes with either curing on DTG or on white toner, could be 30 seconds or 45 seconds or a minute or depending on what you’re printing, it’s a little different. So we can just say minimum, half the heat press time, and then you’re not doing a single garment at a time when you’re printing process. You’re printing on a roll. So that’s really cool things comparing to those technologies.
Then there’s screen print transfers, which I’m not going to claim to be a super dark expert on, but I’ve done them before. And I’ll say that when I had done screen print transfers before, this was before or right when I got or just before I got in the industry, I was selling some apparel and I would order screen print transfers. And I remember one thing with these was that if I touched them while they were too hot or tapped them with my heat press again, I could melt off a part of the transfer or damage it. And for one, direct-to-film does not do that. You could tap it with the heat press a bunch of times. If you had a wrinkle in the shirt, you can just iron it. You can just hit it again and it still holds up. Can you tell me a bit more about comparing it to screen print transfers and benefits or not?
Mike Angel:
Yeah. Screen print transfers are going to fall into the same category in terms of minimum requirements. You’re not going to be able to order one screen print transfer. You’ve got to order a batch of them. You’ve got a minimum quantity. And we’re also talking about screen print so there’s color separation.
Marc Vila:
And can you just break that down what that means for just a minute for anybody who might not know?
Mike Angel:
So for every color in a logo or piece of artwork, there needs to be a screen burnt. There needs to be a screen made. And so with that comes a cost factor. The more colors, the more the print’s going to cost you, and the more the minimum requirement is going to be because you have to set up a press to do so. And so it’s cost-prohibitive to be able to, again, sell online and meet the demands of the current customer base. This is what the customer is asking for. The customers these days have budgets or they don’t want to order a couple of hundred to meet a certain price point, or they want the ability to buy a wider variety of products at less quantities. That’s just the way it is across the industry. So that’s a major difference technically. You mentioned some of the difference in terms of technically, mechanically, the heat temperatures are different, the application process is a bit different and not as tolerant and easy as it is with DTS.
Marc Vila:
Right, right. I found the first time I did a direct-to-film transfer, I just like, “Wow, that was easy.” And I’ve done I feel like every type of technology out there. I’ve done just about all of them in the customization industry outside of a few. And maybe just the only stuff I haven’t done is probably laser or something like that, but that’s a machine doing all the work anyway. But anything that involves hands, I’ve pretty much touched all the different types of transfers. And all of them have their little quirks, but the first time I did direct-to-film, I was literally just like, closed it, I opened it, and I was like, “Wow, that was actually fricking super easy.”
And you mentioned the performance fabrics. One of the challenges with doing performance fabrics are they can, I’m just going to use a bunch of words, distort, discolor, burn, change the consistency of the fabric easy. So if you have to do sublimation which is really high temperature, or you have to put it under a heat press for a really long period of time, you can actually end up with a section of your shirt that looks a little bit different. So when you get to bring that temperature all the way down to, what, 270, 280, 290, depending, something within that range for 7, 8, 9 seconds, that really minimizes the chance of that happening.
The way I think about it, at least sometimes, if you had a plastic spatula and you dropped it in a pan for a second and picked it up, nothing’s going to happen to it. It’s designed to be able to handle that heat. You’ll just pick it up, everything’s fine. But if you drop that spatula on the pan and didn’t realize it and you let it sit in there for one minute, you’re going to have a spatula that is either completely melted or at minimum warped in out of shape that you’ll never get back into shape. And I think that’s the difference is that you could put a piece of apparel that is susceptible to heat over time.
And then I was watching something on TV last night, and I’ll finish with this example because I like it. So I was watching MythBusters. You’re familiar with the show?
Mike Angel:
Yeah.
Marc Vila:
It was just old season. Of course it hasn’t been on the TV for a while. But they did this myth where it was a video of people shooting shrimp out of an air cannon, and they shot it through breadcrumbs and eggs and fire. And then in the end, the fake internet video, they fried shrimp through a cannon. And so the MythBusters were trying to say can we even cook a shrimp that way? And they set up forges that make swords, I don’t know, five of them, thousands of degrees. And they shot raw shrimp through them, thousands of degrees for, I don’t know, 10, 20 feet. And the shrimp was raw on the other end because heat is okay for a short period of time for just about anything. You can put your hand on a candle.
So I think that’s something to consider. That’s a great thing about DTF is because of the short time and temperature, just the tolerance of apparel is much greater and much less dangerous to messing things up versus sublimation or anything where you have to physically put heat on something for sometimes literally a minute, right?
Mike Angel:
Right, that’s correct.
Marc Vila:
Okay, great. So yeah, that was about 15 minutes on direct-to-film printing. And so what we’ll probably do is maybe even we’ll have this episode in full. I’m hoping what we’ll do is we’ll also for those watching or listening, I am planning on probably cutting it too. So maybe we just have this little 15 minute direct-to-film talk separately. So if you’re watching that and you’re curious about some of the mentions of selling online, then please be sure to go to customapparelstartups.com and look for the episode with Mike Angel where we talk about Shopify because there’s a whole longer section just about that. Just add that note at the end there. But thanks for joining us. We really appreciate it. I’m sure a bunch of people have learned a lot and are curious, and we hope to have you on again to talk about some more topics. Do you have any final thoughts or words or anything you wanted to get out before everyone hit stop?
Mike Angel:
Oh, I just encourage everyone to sell online, to make sure that your business is selling online, and to know that we’ve done a lot of the heavy lifting to help you fast track and get that done and really help your business.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, it truly is. We mentioned a lot of reasons why, but I think ultimately the kicker in business is time is the number one, and then that’s everything I think really when it really comes down to it. So if somebody has to, just going through the example for a minute, if somebody’s got to fill out a form and bring it to somebody and that person has to bring it to somebody else who delivers it to you, and then you produce a shirt and you bring it back somewhere else and it goes there, sometimes people just don’t want to do it. Somebody’s just like, “I don’t have time to go to school and fill out the form. I don’t want to have that bad.”
And then also the time for your business that you have to get an email, reply to it, get it again, reply to it, finally get the order, deliver it. Send them a proof, mock-up, like you said, make sure they say yes. And now it’s like a week before the order even got placed and then the person just says, “You know what? I was getting a hat for a baseball game and it’s already passed. Season’s over, we lost. I don’t need it anymore.” So this just allows your customers to directly go. They can order. It’s easy, reduces ton of time for them. The mock-up’s already done. You get the order, it’s got the right logo in it, the right color, everything because the customer’s seen it and approved it, and you can just print it and bring it right to them.
Whether you deliver in person or mail it, that’s up to you. But there is 100% chance that somebody would not have placed an order with you versus them placing it online. So you will get more orders just for being online for the convenience, for those percentage of people who are just be, “Nah, nevermind. It’s too much work.” Because we all do that, right? How many times have you driven down the road and it’s on the left. The store is on the left side of the highway and you’re like, “Nevermind. I don’t really feel… I don’t want to cross traffic that bad to get an extra whatever. I’ll just not get it.” And then you don’t buy it. So it’s true of physical locations and virtual locations.
Well, anyway, thanks again.
Mike Angel:
Yeah, thank you.
Marc Vila:
Everybody out there, appreciate you listening. Please visit coldesi.com to check out everything that we mentioned, all the different pieces of equipment and all that stuff. We have all that stuff available to learn about. And check out ClickWear and the on-demand products if those are right for you too. And go to customapparelstartups.com where you can check out this episode online, and I’ll put in some notes and some links to the various things that we spoke about as well. So thanks, everybody, and have a good business.