screen printing methods

By Michael Jirasek

I remember the first time I worked with a quartz flash. It was a little scary! Flash settings can be tricky and require attention to detail. However, the payoff in increased production more than makes up for the learning curve. Here’s a general guide to help you find the right quartz flash settings for your print jobs.

Screen printing is a competitive industry, so it’s important to always be on the lookout for ways to separate your business from the pack. It’s hard to attract new customers (and retain existing ones) if you can’t catch their eye…and giving metal flake ink a try can help you do just that!

Running an efficient screen printing shop starts with reducing your waste. A print shop generates many different kinds of waste, from misprinted shirts to leftover ink and chemicals to cardboard boxes and other containers. And eliminating this waste isn’t always a straightforward process; some screen printing byproducts are potentially hazardous and require special attention. How do you get it all under control?

Growing your screen printing business happens in one of two ways: You expand your client base or you expand the services you offer. While marketing your current services to new customers will no doubt help you increase your business, offering new products and services provides the best of both worlds, as you can sell more to your existing clients and attract new clients with your expanded offerings.

The market for workwear can be a golden opportunity for garment decorators. Construction, emergency and industrial workers not only require clothing that shows they’re part of a team, they also require clothing that keeps them safe.

When you hear “screen printing”, your mind probably goes to decorative applications: t-shirts, sweatshirts, hats and signs. If you’re a screen printing professional, you might be concerned about the future of your craft, as other printing methods like direct-to-garment printing have encroached on screen printing’s traditional turf. The good news is that there’s much more to screen printing than apparel and promotional items.

As the demands of decorating performance wear increasingly cross over into the world of fashion, it’s become necessary to develop new inks for screen printing. Given the strength and extreme stretch of many of these fabrics, it can be difficult to get the desired result, even with special additives. In response to these challenges, a number of ink manufacturers have developed silicone based inks.

If you’ve ever tried to create the perfect color for a persnickety customer, you know color matching ink for screen printing can be a complicated proposition. Sure you have color matching systems to guide you, but many factors can interfere with color matching in screen printing.

In the competitive world of screen printing, you have to offer services to your customers that make your screen printing business stand out. Finishing services – such as relabeling, hang tagging, bagging or specialty packing – could be what makes a potential customer choose your shop over a competitor’s.

An automatic screen printing press is an exciting addition to any shop’s production floor. Automatic presses speed up production time, so press runs that used to take a day now only take hours. However, screen printing shops that adopt automatics shouldn’t be too fast to retire their manual screen printing presses.

You’ve decided to go for it and make contract printing a part of your business. You know it’ll be very competitive, so you’ve got to carefully evaluate what you’ll offer and at what cost.

Are you looking for a way to increase your output and your profit? Do you have lulls in your regular screen printing schedule that you’d like to fill with work?