Most exhibitors reported that they were encouraged by the attendance. We have not seen any official attendance numbers but it certainly seemed to be a busy show this year. That will be good news for the industry and may be a reason for optimism, particularly in the U.S.

It remains to be seen whether it indicates the same for the Canadian textile screen printing industry in 2012. However, as our pre-show survey predicted, very few Canadians attended the show. The lack of  Canadian attendance was disappointing particularly because Long Beach is still the biggest and best purely textile screen printing show in North America. Most respondents to our survey told us that given the current economic state of the Canadian industry, the expense of attending was not in the budget this year.  

If you had attended with a specific purpose in mind, such as looking for a particular piece of equipment or a consumable, you would almost certainly have found it. Most established manufacturers were exhibiting, even if some of them had downsized their booths from previous years. If you had gone to browse the show looking for something new to blow you away, you would probably have been disappointed. But even in the absence of ‘wow!’, attendance at least every couple of years helps to keep you in touch with developments in the industry and with key manufacturers and supliers.  

Even though it had absolutely nothing to do with screen printing, there was a bit of ‘wow!’ for some when they found that Carmen Electra was in attendance on Saturday at one of the booths for an hour. Since she probably did not come cheaply, we hope that she sold enough digital printers for her hosts to justify her appearance money. An interesting bit of trivia we heard was that another exhibitor also inquired about hiring a has-been televison star to attend for three hours but they canned the idea when the asking fee turned out to be $50,000.00.

And while on the topic of trivia, how about this statistic for putting the size of the Canadian textile screen printing industry into perspective? A U.S. ink company representative mentioned that his top 100 customers in Southern California and Baja alone, have 700 automatic presses collectively. 

But back to the show… Wilflex was showing a 16-colour Disney print done with their new Ecolution PVC-free ink. It looked and felt like a plastisol print and the ink apparently prints just like plastisol. It is not yet widely available as it is still undergoing some final tweeking in field tests but already it seems to be vastly better than any other PVC-free ink in the market. The demand for PVC-free ink is being driven by large customers like Adidas, Nike and Disney. Adidas, for example, issued their ‘Hazardous Substances Policy, A-01′ in September last year in which they specifically exclude PVC from their clothing line. That is all very well, but the bad news is that PVC-free ink is apparently going to be about twice the price of regular plastisol.   

Also confirmed at this show is the shift away from conventional plastisol as we have known it for years, to Phthalate-free ink.  Phthalates are what make vinyls pliable not only in screen printing ink but also in items like the tubes and intravenous equipment used in hospitals, which makes us wonder why it is okay in a hospital but not on a t-shirt. The major international ink manufacturers have already switched or are in the process of switching. Customer pressure and legislation in the U.S. and Europe has prompted the change. There is no legislated requirement (or serious customer pressure) for Phthalate-free ink in Canada yet but it cannot be too far off because the Canadian government has Phthalates in its sights already with regard to children’s toys.     

If you have any specific questions about the show that we have not covered, please just ask and we will do our best to address them. As usual, we are at info@screenflex.ca or toll-free at 1 800 661 7766.

So far our survey has not detected much interest among Candian screen printers in attending the Long Beach show on the 20th, 21st and 22nd of this month. Various reasons have been mentioned but the most common to date is cost.

We have often pointed out that, in our opinion, the Long Beach show is the premier textile screen printing show in North America. This has been particularly true for a number of years now ever since the emphasis of the SGIA show shifted from a healthy dose of textile screen printing to digital graphics.

Arguments have been made from time-to-time that the shows should perhaps run every second year. In fact, it is our understanding that a few influential individuals in the industry raised the topic with particular reference to the SGIA show a few years ago already. We have also noticed that over the past few years at all the shows a few large manufacturers have scaled back their presence while others have not appeared at all.

The same applies to the shows in Canada which are now considerably smaller than they once were and the focus now is almost exclusively on garments.   

But in spite of these changes, we still encourage our Canadian customers to keep abreast of developments in the textile screen printing industry by attending at least one good textile screen printing show at least every couple of years. And, as mentioned before, if you are going to budget to attend only one show and want the best bang for your textile screen printing buck, we suggest that you make it the Long Beach show.

So what does this dog and his veterinarian have to do with screen printing? Well, not a whole lot except that Ryley has been one of Screenflex’s beloved mascots for the past 16 years. So there is just enough of a connection to provide us with an excuse to tell an interesting tale about how some businesses have figured out how to generate revenue in ways and at a rate that we could never dream of doing in our industry.

Ryley has already passed the 14 to 16 year upper limit of the life expectancy of a Jack Russell Terrier. While he is still in great physical shape (can still catch mice, chase squirrels, go on long wallks and do victory laps after a poop), his mind is not what it used to be. He is showing signs of Canine Cognitive Dysfunction, which is basically doggy dementia and is quite common in older dogs. They start doing weird things like sometimes just staring at nothing, wandering around aimlessly, barking at nothing in particular and, the most annoying thing in Ryley’s case, barking at three o’clock in the morning.

After one too many episodes of barking in the middle of the night, Ryley had an appointment with the vet last Friday. We  had done some research on the internet first and I went to the appointment armed with a Canine Cognitive Dysfunction checklist that showed that Ryley checked most of the boxes.

Here is where you are going to start wishing that you had this vet as your sales manager. The first option she offered was a referral to a veterinary neurologist for a brain scan and consultation. I declined that before even inquring about the cost because, I mean, really, of what use would the results be when the ‘patient’ was already past his best-by date? What could we honestly do with a picture of his old brain? The next option offered was a daily pill that would apparently ease the symptoms and make the dog ‘more manageable’. I selected to try that. ”Good”, said the vet, “but first we must do a blood test to make sure that he can take these pills.” She picked him up to take him downstairs for the blood test and said that she would also adjust his back because I had mentioned that it had not been done for some time.

The consultation only took about ten minutes and, about another ten minutes later, a nurse brought Ryley back and told us that we were good to go. On the way out we had to check in at the front desk and settle the bill.  If you have ever had a pet, you are probably very familiar with that dreadful procedure. I have for a long time felt that every vet’s front desk should serve stiff shots of medicinal brandy with their bills. We once bumped into a ’patient’ and his owner leaving the same vet’s office as we were arriving. He could obviously have used a stiff shot of medicinal brandy. As they came out through the door he seemed to be taking the shock of his bill out on his dog by pulling the leash and yelling, “Come on, Sh**thead!” It had to be the shock of the bill; nobody calls a dog Sh**thead.

Anyway, there we were at the dreaded front desk and, without any shame at all, the assistant handed me the bill for the twenty minutes we had taken out of their busy day. $74.00 for the consultation (even though we had done the diagnoses for her with our checklist), $159.00 for the blood test, $150.00 for 30 Anipryl tablets, $40.00 for the back adjustment, plus tax for a total of just over $450.00! For 20 minutes! And no brandy! At that moment it crossed my mind that that was approximately what we paid for Ryley when we got him as a six-week old puppy and that if he lived for another two years, the tablets would cost $3,650.00, or the equvalent of nine new Jack Russell puppies.

Now ask yourself this, when last has your sales manager put in a performance like that? And does your sales manager follow up the way that this vet does? Later, while discussing the blood test results on the phone, she said that there was a slight issue with a kidney and that Ryley should go on a low-protein food that, wait for it…  could only be bought from their office because it was not available in the stores. 

Well, we got a second opinion from an older and wiser semi-retired veterinarian whom we have known for a long time and who said that he had never prescribed Anipryl and sugested a natural alternative, Ginkgo Biloba. A little research confirmed that 20 mg of Ginkgo Biloba a day showed equally impressive results as the 5 mg Anipryl tablets. Just for the record, Screenflex’s ageing mascot is now on  Ginkgo Biloba at a penny a day and the $5.00-a-day Anipryl is going back.

And as for the low-protein special food only available from the vet’s office, why would anyone impose a tasteless vegetarian diet on a geriatric dog? Isn’t old age tough enough? When the inevitable time comes, Ryley is going to go out still enjoying his daily bison sausages.

By now you might have experienced the sharp rise in stencil remover prices. And if you have been told that it is all due to the Japanese tsunami of March this year, that would be correct.

The key ingredient in stencil removers is sodium metaperiodate. A key ingredient in the production of sodium metaperiodate is iodide, which is extracted from seaweed. The tsunami apparently severely damaged the iodide extracton plants with the result is that there is now a world-wide shortage of iodide and sodium metaperiodate. And as usually happens when a commodity becomes scarce, the price shoots up.

Price and shortage are not the only problems. We heard an interesting story that illustrates how shortages like this one seem to bring out the worst in some people. Screenflex is very careful to only deal with the most reputable of manufacturers and it pays off when you hear what happened to one manufacturer. They thought that they had got very lucky when they found a foreign supplier offering sodium metaperiodate at a very attractive price. Unfortunately, as they say, when something seems to be too good to be true, it usually is. In this case, the shipment was received but when it was quality checked in the lab, they found that the sodium metaperiodate had been ‘cut’ or ‘diluted’ with salt.

Screenflex has a good supply of stencil remover still at attractive prices. However, we don’t know what the future holds. Some manufacturers of stencil remover have hiked their prices by 50% or more already. Apparently one manufacturer of sodium metaperiodate has already warned that there could be a further price increase of about 15% early in the new year. It is going to be a case of waiting and seeing.

We’ll keep an eye on this and post any new information when it becomes known.

With the busy summer season behind us and long Canadian snowy nights to look forward to, it’s that time again for a log on the fire and a blog on the computer.

We know that, generally speaking, the recovery in the textile screen printing industry in Canada has a way to go yet, but we hope that if you didn’t have a great summer season, you at least had a reasonable one.

And talking about the state of the industry and this past summer, didn’t it drive you crazy when you saw that picture of our Prime Minister touring the state-of-the-art Gildan manufacturing plant? We assume that it was supposed to be a celebration of Canadian ingenuity, entrepreneurship and job creation; we would just have preferred for the factory and the textile jobs to have been in Canada instead of Honduras. Because, as we have discovered, the screen printing tends to follow the manufacturing to wherever it goes. 

We just can’t get our heads around how exporting Canadian jobs can be good for the Canadian economy. It certainly hasn’t been good for the Canadian textile screen printing industry!

We have been mentioning for some time that the price of products such as white paint, white ink etc. that have as their core pigment Titanium Dioxide, have all been going up in price due to the world-wide shortage of that pigment. The impact of the shortage is not quite as bad as the impact of the cotton shortage, but it is still bad. 

Screenflex has been holding back on implementing the price increases for white inks from Wilflex for about a year but cannot do so any more. Our White Buffalo has been affected most of all because we had been offering it at a special price but have now had to adjust that price. We have calculated the overall impact of the increase on the “average” print to be about 1.7 cents (assuming 100% white coverage) or .85 cents if the print has say 50% white coverage.

We are going to endeavour to hold the new price for as long as we can for this very popular white ink as well as the others such as PolyWhite (for 100% poly and cotton/poly blends), Bright Tiger and Solar White. We have been warned though that much will depend upon the world-wide Titanium Dioxide situation in the future as unfortunately there is no apparent economically viable alternative at the moment.

Here is the seventh extract from Rafi Mohammed’s book, The Art of Pricing. From the chapter, Differential Pricing, he tells an interesting tale to make us carefully consider why we might sometimes offer “quantity” discounts…

“… there are many justifications for quantity discounts. My only caution is that you should understand why you are granting a discount. Sometimes large orders simply mean, “I love your product.” On the way to a barbeque last summer, I stopped at my local gourmet food shop to buy thirty pounds of beef ribs to make my famous Korean-style ribs. The butcher’s brightened mood, brought about by a seemingly quick and profitable sale, dampened when I asked him to cut the ribs thinly. After twenty minutes of intense slicing, the meat was ornately packaged and ready to go. As you probably guessed, I could not resist the temptation of inquiring; “Since I am buying a lot of meat, do I get a volume discount?” Even I was surprised when the butcher, literally without a second thought, sliced the price from $8 to $6 a pound. While I appreciated the $60.00 savings, there really was no reason for him to offer the discount; I had not indicated that price was an issue and had already made the order at the agreed-upon price.”

You might be planning to attend the screen printing shows later in the year or you may be off on a summer vacation soon. In either case, if the trip involves staying in hotels, here is something that you should consider. It came to us as an email and, while we generally ignore emails of this nature, we felt that this one might actually be worth passing on.

It is about the fact that apparently the key cards that most hotels issue to guests nowadays contain more personal information than you might have supposed. We have not attempted to verify this, but even if it is only half true, there is no harm in exercising caution, particularly as identity theft and other fraud is an ongoing problem. Here is the explanation extracted from the email…

“Grab a refrigerator magnet on your way out the door, we all have tons of them!

 Always take a small magnet on your vacation , they come in handy at the end of  it. Never even thought about key cards containing anything other than an access code for the room!   Ever wonder what is on a magnetic key card? 

Answer: 

a. Customer’s name 
b. Customer’s partial home address 
c. Hotel room number 
d. Check-in date and check-out date 
e. Customer’s credit card number and expiration date!  

When you turn them in to the front desk your personal information is there for any hotel employee to access by simply scanning the card in the hotel scanner. An employee can take a hand full of cards home and, using a scanning device, access the information onto a laptop computer and go shopping at your expense. Simply put, hotels do not erase the information on these cards until an employee reissues the card to the next hotel guest. At that time, the new guest’s information is electronically ‘overwritten’ on the card and the previous guest’s information is erased in the overwriting process.  

But until the card is rewritten for the next guest, it usually is kept in a drawer at the front desk with YOUR INFORMATION ON IT! The bottom line is: Keep the cards, take them home with you, or destroy them.  NEVER leave them behind in the room or room wastebasket, and NEVER turn them into the front desk when you check out of a room. They will not charge you for the card (it’s illegal) and you’ll be sure you are not leaving a lot of valuable personal information on it that could be easily lifted off with any simple scanning device card reader. For the same reason, if you arrive at the airport and discover you still have the card key in your pocket, do not toss it in an airport trash basket. Take it home and destroy it by cutting it up, especially through the electronic information strip.

If you have a small magnet, pass it across the magnetic strip several times. Then try it in the door, it will not work. It erases everything on the card.”  

Credit: Image by Peter Wynn Thompson for the New York Times.

The New York Times recently offered this case study (Author: Adriana Gardella) which should be of interest to Canadian textile screen printers. The NYT published this one week and then followed up the next week with reaction and comments from other business owners. We will bring you the follow-up next week.

So here it is, and we’ll be surprised if it doesn’t sound familiar to many of you…

“Darren Robbins and a partner founded Big D Custom Screen Printing in 2007. In its first year, the company, which is based in Austin, Tex., and specializes in printing T-shirts, recorded sales of $325,000 and a small loss.

THE CHALLENGE To become profitable, Big D must determine whether to cater to customers with large printing orders or small.

THE BACKGROUND Mr. Robbins, a former full-time musician who still plays in a band, was nostalgic for the multicolor tour shirts of his youth, which he described as “works of art.” He said he was appalled by the one-color shirts sold at today’s shows. He was also disappointed by the quality of shirts created by some of Austin’s many screen printers and said he could do better.

With that goal, Mr. Robbins and his partner, who worked for Capitol Records, invested a total of $225,000 to open Big D. The division of labor was clear. “I was a natural-born customer-service geek, and he was a natural-born salesman,” said Mr. Robbins, who resolved to take care of the customers his partner brought in. “We wanted to be one of the big boys.”

As his partner traveled the country trying to win accounts, Mr. Robbins ran the shop, frequently declining business from potential customers who requested small orders. Mr. Robbins, 44, who has a background in ad agency account management, said that turning away business kept him up nights. He wanted every call to end with a sale.

By the end of its first year, Big D had grabbed a few big accounts — local video game and record companies that placed orders for 5,000 to 15,000 shirts. But when the shop was not cranking out large orders, it sat idle. Mr. Robbins said his partner feared that small orders would prevent Big D from handling bigger jobs should they come in. But given his ad agency experience, Mr. Robbins said he was used to demanding clients and short deadlines. “With effective scheduling, you can pretty much accommodate any customer,” he said. Following the lead of his competitors, he charged more per shirt for the smaller orders he did take.

THE OPTIONS At first, Mr. Robbins and his partner agreed on strategy. With their industry contacts, they said they believed they could land accounts from major bands. Focusing on high-volume orders made sense to them in part because Big D’s suppliers offered a price break on large quantity T-shirt orders.

But the partners did not realize that most bands were locked in to long-term contracts for their tour shirts. Given that, Mr. Robbins started to wonder about the strategy of chasing down high-volume clients, particularly when he had so many smaller prospects knocking on his door. But, he said, his partner saw no point in accepting orders for one or two shirts. His partner continued to believe big orders were crucial to profitability and that he could best win those accounts by conducting in-office presentations for corporate prospects across the country.

THE DECISION After a year in business, Mr. Robbins threw an anniversary party in April 2008 to thank his employees for their dedication. His partner, however, opposed the modest celebration because its cost meant the difference between breaking even and showing a loss on Big D’s first-year sales. This disagreement highlighted the increasing tension between the partners’ growth philosophies.

Determined to accept smaller orders, Mr. Robbins bought out his partner around the time of the party. The split was amicable, Mr. Robbins said, with his former partner breaking even on the sale and returning to the music business. And then the economy crashed. “Almost overnight, companies tightened their belts,” Mr. Robbins said.

At that point, he decided that no order was too small. He would find a way to take all business, even an order for a single T-shirt. He knew there would not be a lot of competition from the other local screen printers for the small orders. “I noticed they weren’t in a huge hurry to fit them in,” he said.  

 Big D began catering to those with small needs, including a Houston comedian who wanted 20 shirts. Once he made a decision to take all orders, Mr. Robbins reassessed his costs and determined that he could make a profit on the smaller orders, even without charging the significant markup that many of his competitors charged — a markup that effectively discouraged customers from placing small orders. Instead, Mr. Robbins lowered prices on smaller orders, bringing them more in line with the per-shirt price for large orders. Big D charges $5 per shirt for 40 to 499 white T-shirts printed with one color, while the charge for an order of 1,000 or more shirts is $3.50 per shirt. He was able to take this step and still make a profit because, regardless of order size, Big D’s costs to print the shirts were not that high. Because of the quantity discount, the company would still make a greater profit on its large orders, but Mr. Robbins said he decided to “be as fair as possible” on the smaller orders. His prices for one shirt, a “micro-run,” begin at $25.

He also eliminated set-up charges, a common fee charged by printers, and put his prices on Big D’s website, mostly so he did not have to memorize them. “Many of our competitors make you come to them for a price quote, adding a day to the process,” Mr. Robbins said. He hoped that Big D’s transparent pricing would become another way for the company to differentiate itself.

“The competition — and my partner — thought I was nuts,” he said. But Mr. Robbins said he understood his costs and could become profitable “without gouging people.”

Last November we reported on this blog that a world-wide shortage of Titanium Dioxide (the key ingredient in white pigments and ink) was having an impact on white ink prices. While a number of suppliers increased their white prices, Screenflex managed to hold the Wilflex white ink prices steady until now. Unfortunately though, Wilflex has announced an increase in their white ink prices again and now Screenflex has no choice but to do the same.

The increase will be as limited as possible and will be announced shortly.

The original post can be found here: http://www.insidescreenprinting.com/titanium-dioxide-and-white-ink-prices/

We have on occasion addressed the topic of sensitivity to what sometimes appears on t-shirts and how it can come back to haunt and possibly ruin a textile screen printer. The latest case involves swimsuits produced in Australia using the image of a Hindu goddess.

The lesson to be learnt from these incidents is that if you are producing an image for public viewing, which is the core of what we do in this industry, then you should exercise good judgement and good taste. The cost of failing to do that could be devastating to a screen printer. 

Here is a report on the Australian-manufactured swimsuit in question:

Image above and report below from Agence France-Presse, with files from news services.

LUCKNOW, India — A top Indian court has agreed to consider criminal proceedings over an Australian brand of swimwear bearing the image of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi that has sparked angry protests.

The Allahabad High Court in Uttar Pradesh will hear a “public interest litigation,” brought by lawyers over photographs of the swimwear published in a Hindi daily.

They argued the newspaper should not have published the photographs and the Indian government should have pushed Australia to take action against the manufacturer, Lisa Blue Swimwear.

The photographs were from a fashion show in Sydney last week that saw models take to the catwalk in swimsuits and bikinis covered in images of Lakshmi, the goddess of light, prosperity and fertility.

News of the show triggered protests in India at the weekend, with Hindu groups in the northern state of Punjab burning Australian flags and photos of the swimwear in the streets.

The president of the Universal Society of Hinduism was quoted in the North India Times saying the religion’s deities deserved respect.

“Lakshmi was meant to be worshipped in temples or home shrines and not for pushing swimwear in fashion shows for mercantile greed of an apparel company,” president Rajan Zed said.

The company put out a statement promising to halt production immediately and apologizing for any offence the design may have caused.

“This range will never be available for sale in any stockists or retail outlets anywhere in the world,” it said.

“We apologize to the Hindu community and take this matter very seriously.”

This is the fifth week of referencing extracts from Rafi Mohammed’s book, The Art of Pricing. This time the topic is market share. In North America (and particularly our neighbours to the south) it is almost taken as a given that a business can only be successful if it grows, and the faster the better. Unfortunately, many small business owners seem to accept this without question and then get into trouble when they focus on volume instead of margin, because they drop prices to attract the volume without calculating what it is doing to their margin. Then, as we have discussed in earlier posts, they end up working harder for the same or less.

Rafi Mohammed, from his chapter “The Culture of Profit”:

“Most companies focus on achieving the highest possible market share. Unfortunately, achieving the largest market share in a competitive market is rarely the most profitable operating point for a company. The drawback of focusing on market share is that prices have to be lowered to attract more customers. You don’t want to end up in a situation in which you are selling a lot of volume but, because prices had to be dropped, not making much money off of each customer. There is usually a trade-off between customer profitability and market share. The compromise is to focus on profitable volume.”  

CTV is reporting that “Environment Canada says we could be in for a warmer-than-normal summer across the country. Senior climatologist David Phillips says preliminary forecasts indicate June, July and August will be warmer than normal from coast to coast”

Okay, since warm weather is t-shirt weather, let’s hope that the man is right.

Distractions like the election and the brutal winter, are over. Would it be too much to ask that you now get out and do your patriotic duty by helping to get the economy moving? Here’s a great idea… how about hitting the mall for a few Canadian-printed t-shirts?

We have addressed the issue of suspected scam emails directed at our industry before. Having received these recently though, just minutes apart, we thought that it was time to post a reminder that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it is probably a duck.

First one…

 “Hello

This is Mill George, i will like to order for 100 pieces of T shirt and i will like japan print on it and so it will be in 1 color and the shirts will be in assorted colors and the printing will be at the back of the shirt,attached is the artwork so get back to me with the total cost for this plus tax and i have a shipper that will be coming for the pick up of the shirt when they are ready and i will like to know when they will be ready . so i will be waiting for your email with the total cost and you accept credit card for payment. Looking forward to read from you ASAP.  

     Thanks

     George”

Second one just minutes later…

“Hello

    This is Nicolas Kirk, i will like to know if you can print on 150 pieces of mugs and i will like it to be in 2 colors black and yellow so get back to me with the total cost for this plus tax and attached is the sample of what i want and i have a shipper that will be bringing the mugs and come for the pick up of the mugs when they are ready and i will like to know when they will be ready . so i will be waiting for your email with the total cost and you accept credit card for payment. Looking forward to read from you ASAP. 

     Thanks

      Kirk”

We are not quite sure what “George” and “Kirk” are up to, or how things are intended to unfold after these initial emails, but we are pretty sure that we know how a duck walks. You decide.