Anatol blog

In a recent blog post, we covered seven screen printing tips to improve the quality of your products. Today, we’re expanding upon that by exploring seven screen printing mistakes to help you avoid saying, “I will never make that mistake again.”

Traffic, gas prices, long car rides – the morning commute to work can be a real pain. And once you arrive, you’re spending long hours making money for someone else and missing out on what’s most important – your family.

Visited a screen printing trade show lately? If you’re a manual printer who’s just seen an automatic press in action, you might think “there’s no way I can keep pushing a squeegee!”

With so much attention on applying ink to shirts, it’s easy to forget that pre-press is just as important! If your screen hasn’t been properly prepared before it goes on the press, even perfect printing technique won’t deliver a quality print. There are so many variables that factor into exposing your screens it can be difficult to get a good result, especially if you’re unfamiliar with the process.

We’ve listened to the feedback from our customers and made the commitment not to offer you anything less than the best customer care you can get in the t-shirt screen printing equipment industry. The entire Anatol team has rededicated itself to going the extra mile to help our customers in whatever way we can. It’s not just talk – we’ve made concrete changes and are prepared to walk the long walk.

So you’ve just finished a successful print run and decided to get started on another. You go to the rack for a fresh screen but they’re nowhere to be found! Your lack of planning left you with a pile of dirty screens caked with ink. Now what?

Do you have a favorite t-shirt? You know, the soft cotton one with the soft handed, distressed print on the front? Everyone has one, and there’s a pretty good chance it was printed using water based ink. Customers love the soft feel and clean, smooth look of water based prints.

As a screen printer, every order you get is different. The design possibilities in screen printing are virtually limitless; some customers might not have a good idea of what they want their garment to look like, others can be very particular. A customer may request a specific printing process, fabric, ink type or color. You can meet most of these demands relatively easily. However, reproducing a specific color is often easier said than done.

Is your screen printing shop struggling to meet tight deadlines? Is your manual press keeping you from taking bigger, more complex jobs? If so, it might be time to upgrade to an automatic t-shirt screen printing machine. With a single operator, an automatic press runs at least 3-5 times faster than a manual press, allowing you to tackle larger production runs with more colors. And with automatic presses available with compact footprints, you should be able to find one that fits your existing work space – no need to restructure, no need to move!

So you’ve decided you want to get into the garment printing industry but you’re not sure how to get started. No worries, everyone was a beginner at some point! Let’s put first things first, like deciding which style of customization you want to pursue. When it comes to printing textiles, two of the most common options are screen printing and direct to garment (DTG) printing.

One of the most common questions we hear among beginners in the screen printing world is “what ink should I use?” To find the answer, consider another question: “what are you looking to print?”. It’s not a matter of trying to find the “best” screen printing ink in the industry, but rather finding an ink that will give you the results you need. In order to figure out what ink will best suit your project, it’s important to understand the properties and applications of different screen printing inks.

Tom and his wife Tammy are owners of a small-time screen printing business that makes just under $100,000 a year. Growth has been steady and they’re ready to expand production, but the manual screen printing press they’re using limits the amount of jobs they can take. Upgrading to an automatic press raises concerns about space at their facility, but is it really a problem? Not necessarily! Tom and Tammy have plenty of options that will allow them to fit a new press into their existing space and get on their way to business growth and more profits. It’s a matter of clearing the clutter, doing the math and purchasing with a plan.