Finally some good news out of the U.S. for Canadian screen printers! A letter from Ulano to its distributors dated January 18th, 2010 and signed by Gary Gayton is interesting for the fact that it is not a usual manufacturer’s annual sorry-but-we-have-no-choice-but-to-increase-prices whine.

Quoting from the first paragraph…

“As Al Guercio mentions in his column in the January issue of the Ulano Worldwide Distributor Report, our sales – your purchases from us – have been on the rebound for some months now. No one can be sure we’re out of the recessionary woods yet and there are continuing risks of higher energy and chemical costs, inflation, and devaluation of the US Dollar. Nevertheless, we have decided not  to increase prices at this time. We think this is supportive of you and our mutual customers in what is still a difficult, uncertain economy.”

Notice…  Ulano has decided to NOT increase prices.

Screenflex applauds this news. Finally somebody seems to appreciate what the surviving textile screen printers have been enduring lately, particularly those on this side of the border.

As the 2010 Winter Games approach, it is time to resurrect this article first published in 2008…

Kathleen salutes our Beijing Olympians and their 18 medals in her official Canadian Olympic Team t-shirt. She also looks forward to great results from our winter Olympians with her official Vancouver 2010 sun visa.

Canadian gear! Canadian pride! Made in China?

We know that others have been objecting publicly about Canadian Olympic apparel being produced abroad, but we want to take up the cause on behalf of our industry specifically.

Canadian pride is important, but so are Canadian jobs, in this case, screen printing jobs. Why can’t we tie the two together? Why can’t the Canadian Olympic Committees show some of the patriotism that they expect the rest of us to show? Why don’t they insist that all Canadian Olympic licensed gear has to be produced in Canada? We have textile manufacturing and textile screen printing industries decimated by an exodus of work to low-wage destinations abroad. It takes a special kind of gall to ask an unemployed Canadian textile worker or a failed screen shop owner to proudly wear a Maple Leaf sewn and printed in China!

Canadians don’t seem to realize that Canadian jobs and Canadian businesses are being destroyed by their greedy clamour for cheap products made by foreign workers in foreign countries. When that greed overshadows even national pride, it has gone too far. 

How about this for a suggestion to deal with out misplaced priorities problem? Before our athletes get a boost from any of the additional tax payers’ money that they want in order to produce more medals and boost national pride, let’s give the tax payers a boost by stopping the flow of Olympic textile and screen printing jobs to offshore locations. Let’s rethink Canadian national pride a bit and let’s keep more of its economic benefits inside Canada.

And don’t bother pointing out that Kathleen is wearing Canadian pride made in China. She’s a dummy. What’s your excuse?

Now your kid is ready to dive fully protected from the possibility of being poisoned by any lead in the little screen-printed logo on the suit. So strap on the 20 lb lead weight diving belt on your child and let’s go!

Whaaat?!!

Exactly!

One has to ask. Has this legislation been thought through properly?

Thanks to the customer who brought this example to our attention today. His company manufactures wet suits in three places around the globe. It seems that he now has to go to a lot of trouble and expense to switch to lead-free and phthalate-free ink and to have the prints on children’s wet suits certified by an independent accredited laboratory. He quite rightly wonders by what reasoning the 20 lb lead weight belt is exempt. If you have any similar examples, email me at michael.best@screenflex.ca  We might as well get a bit of a laugh out of this, even as we are being forced to comply.

“Just push a button and watch this machine make money.” I promise you, that was the bold statement right there underneath a video presentation on the web site of a Canadian distributor promoting a brand of digital tee-shirt printers.

The video of a black tee-shirt being printed on the inkjet printer was presumably designed to convince everyone that it is finally possible to produce reasonable digital prints on dark shirts. Down in the left-hand corner of the video image they kindly provided a running stopwatch to prove that the print only takes 3 1/2 minutes.

ONLY three and a half minutes? For ONE print? Not counting the time taken to load and unload? Well yes, and you are right, we should add in 30 seconds for loading, clamping, unclamping and unloading. So let’s call it only 4 minutes per print. Now we need some quick math to do a production projection…  and the answer is…  a maximum production rate of 15 prints an hour!

Hard to tell too much about the design from the video, but we know that it is a straight-forward print with no special effects because direct-to-shirt inkjet printing cannot do special effects. By contrast with the digital printing rate of 15 an hour without special effects, automatic screen printing can produce the same print with special effects at the rate of between 500 and 1,000 per hour.

“Fifteen shirts an hour?” you ask again. How does that pay the bills? I don’t know. You do the math this time. Start with the machine. It costs anything from $8,500.00 for a “refurbished” model to $19,715.00 for the new and latest model. And we are not talking about a top-of-the-line brand here. According to the same web site, the ink will run you anything from $347.00 per liter (that’s about the size of a quart) to $519.20 per liter depending upon the size of container that you buy. That, by the way, works out at somewhere between $1,450.00 and $2,100.00 per gallon. Then there is the labour to run the machine at, let’s say, $15.00 per hour (or $1.00 per print).

See the problem? If you are a wholesaler or contract printer, you know the going rate in your market for a print on a dark shirt, and you also know that it will barely pay just the labour cost at 15 prints per hour. How are you going to pay for the other direct costs like the machine, the expensive  ink, maintenance and repairs? How are you going to pay the overheads and make a profit? Exactly! I don’t know either. And we haven’t yet begun to talk about problems with lint and other issues typical of a textile production environment.

But let’s say that you are not a contract printer, that you are instead a retailer, or better still, you intend selling directly over the internet for the going rate of anything from about $5.00 to $12.00 per shirt. In that case you might be able to justify the high cost of the digital print, but then you had better be selling a fairly high volume.  Before splashing out $8,000.00 to $20,000.00 on a single-station inkjet tee-shirt printer you should be pretty sure that you can do the volume to justify the expense. I’m sure that you would be realistic enough to expect others to also be chasing that volume. How many others? You might want to Google “custom tee shirts” and review the 240,000 entries by your potential competitors.  

For our textile screen printing customers, the vast majority of whom are contract printers and not retailers, “Just push the button and watch this machine make money” might just sound a little far-fetched once they have done the math.

Got a comment? Think I’m full of it? Email me at michael.best@screenflex.ca

Last Saturday morning I was ”greenmailed” at my favourite health food store. The whole operation had Greenfarce’s prints all over it. 

The enthusiastic young eco-warrior at the cash register announced triumphantly that the store’s bagging had gone “green”. She gave me the choice of either paying 5 cents each for the previously free disposable plastic grocery bags or 99 cents for their new re-usable, recyclable,  environmentally-friendly bag. “And better still”, the  check-out activist for an environmentally friendly society warned me, “by April the plastic bags will be like totally gone!”

Not wishing to appear to be an uncaring polluter of the planet in the presence of the assorted health nuts and tree huggers lined up behind me at the cash register, I gave in to the charming greenmailer and paid the 99 cents for the environmentally friendly ”green” bag. I could sense the collective approval of the lineup for my caring and consideration for the well-being of the planet until I drove away in my gas-guzzling 1987 BMW 535i restoration project, at which point my approval rating probably hit rock bottom.

Later that afternoon I was trying to trace the source of a chemical smell in the kitchen at home. Well guess what? It was coming from my new “environmentally friendly” shopping bag. A closer sniff confirmed that it was the thick layer of screen-printed green ink that was putting out the chemical stink.  

I have been around plastisol screen printing ink for 20 years and could therefore tell right away that the ink was not plastisol. After taking the bag to the office on Monday and consulting with our experienced staff, we decided that it was either a thickly-applied solvent-based vinyl ink or perhaps a rubber ink. It doesn’t matter which, because neither are “environmentally friendly”. That made us take a closer look at the bag. The slogans printed along the bottom of the bag urged one, among other “green” slogans, to “support fair trade” , “act locally”, “reduce” and “reuse”.

I called the store’s head office and was eventually directed to the marketing manager who needed very little prompting to admit that the bags were made and printed in China. He said that unfortunately the ink was solvent or petroleum based because a more environmentally friendly ink, such as a soy based ink, did not print well enough on the woven recycled plastic bag. I should have asked if he understood the concept of “carbon footprint” and that the carbon footprint of his environmentally friendly Chinese bag could well exceed the carbon footprint of the old-fashioned flimsy plastic bags. It also slipped my mind to ask why then they did not use a natural fibre bag such as say cotton canvas and screen the green print in one of Wilflex’s environmentally friendly inks right here in Canada. 

If you were the store management wouldn’t you have asked yourself a few key questions before leaping onto the “green” bandwagon? Is this bag an example of what “green” means? Are we turning ”green” into a farce? Does “support fair trade” mean exporting fair-wage local jobs to low-wage China or is that what ”act locally” means? Does “reduce” mean making “green” bags out of woven plastic and then printing on them with solvent or petroleum based ink? Does ”reuse” mean a non-renewable resource like plastic or should it be referring to renewable resources like cotton? You decide.

Nobody with even just half a brain can fail to see the benefits of going ”green”. ”Green” is a good thing. What is not a good thing is that the whole “green” movement seems to be in the process of being hijacked by a coalition of the ill-informed, the shrill and the opportunistic. They need to  come out in the open and be recognized as an organization. The organization needs a name. How about “Greenfarce”?   

If you have any simliar stories or experiences with the “green” movement I would be happy to hear about them. Drop me a line at michael@screenflex.ca

 

We were chatting today with a printer who was ordering a 5 gallon pail of emulsion. The question of freezing came up because at that time outside our warehouse in Calgary the temperature was about -33 Celsius (approx -28 Fahrenheit). The local radio stations were warning us that with the wind chill effect it was close to -48 Celsius (-54 Fahrenheit) and that exposed flesh would freeze in about a minute. And worse yet, tomorrow Calgary will awake to -38 Celsius. Even in the summer playground of Kelowna where the printer was calling from, it was -15 Celsius.

So, here is a reminder, DO NOT LET EMULSION FREEZE.  Frozen emulsion is useless emulsion. It separates and cannot be re-constituted. We know because about 8 years ago we had two 55 gallon drums of emulsion arrive frozen solid. More recently a skid load of product including emulsion en route to Yellow Knife froze when the truck broke down in the middle of nowhere 500 kilometers south of Yellow Knife. That is why we automatically deliver emulsion by heated service in Canada from October through March and then cross our fingers that  avalanches, break-downs and blizzards won’t mess it all up.

Another tip… plastisol ink is not damaged by the cold weather but it can thicken up a bit and needs to be brought back to room temperature for easier printing. A quick spin on the mixer can help a lot. One thing about plastisol ink though is that prolonged exposure to heat in the bucket can damage it. For instance, storing it next to a constant source of heat like a dryer or flash cure unit is not a good idea.

Canadian weather, yet another variable in screen printing.

At the same auction, a maroon 1973 tour Led Zeppelin t-shirt was bid up to $1,625.00.

The 1975 Led Zeppelin shirt and Physical Graffiti album in the illustration hang on the wall in Screenflex’s Calgary meeting room. We acquired the shirt about 18 years ago and later we found the matching album at an antique show.

Maybe it’s time to scratch around in the bottom of the closet or in that box of old t-shirts in the basement? 

We just cannot let this one slip by without sharing it with our Canadian printers.

Today we had a call from an Ontario printer, it went something like this (names withheld for obvious reasons)…

“Screenflex, good afternoon.”

“Hi. I’m calling from XXXXXX . Can you match and mix PANTONE® colours in plastisol?

“Yes we can. We have been doing that in our two ink labs every day for many years for textile printers across Canada.”

“What ink brands do you have?”

“Only the best one, Wilflex. And we use only Wilflex bases and pigments for colour matches.”

“Can you make just a quart of 159C for me for printing on a black 100% cotton t-shirt?”

“Of course.”

“When?”

“We’ll ship it today.”

“You’re kidding! Are you going to charge me extra for doing that?”

“PANTONE® matches require extra work so they are a dollar or two more than our regular standard colours, but other than that there is nothing extra.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Why do you sound so surprised?”

“I just called my regular ink supplier, XXXXXX. They told me that I would have to buy a gallon, even though I only need a quart and the rest will sit on my shelf forever. Then they said that it would take one-and-a half weeks to ship and that there would be an additional mixing fee of $65.00!”

“Now it’s my turn to ask this…  are you kidding? They are known for selling on price. Sounds like cheap isn’t as cheap as it claims to be. Are you sure you’re not kidding? ”

“No, I’m not kidding. And now I’m so glad I found you! So let’s talk about how I can buy all my ink from you in the future.”

“Well, you can buy online, even PANTONE® colours, at www.screenprintcatalog.com or you can just call us toll-free at 1-800-661-7766….”

“No kidding!”

Okay, so we’re using this call to brag a bit. But it is a great story about how some distributors treat screen printers. We like to hear stories like this because they give us an opportunity to remind textile screen printers that they do not have to tolerate shoddy service, gouging and poor quality cheap products.

There is a moral too… if you are in Canada and you have a PANTONE® match for a textile ink, just call Screenflex or order online because you can have it shipped same day in any size from a quart up, in Wilflex quality, and there is no $65.00 mixing fee.