A Newsletter from Screenflex Inks Canada Ltd. & www.screenprintcatalog.com

With U.S.-sourced screen printing products escalating in price due to the sudden increase in the cost of a U.S. dollar, and ink being no exception, our focus has been turned back to ink cost efficiency.

First of all though, before we look at ink costs, printers should keep in mind that they have much bigger cost issues brought on by the decline in the value of the Canadian dollar. Garments, equipment and other imported items should be receiving much more attention than the pennies per print that ink represents.

But since at Screenflex our focus is ink, we want to remind you that there are measures you can take to reduce the volume of ink that you apply to garments and in so doing, reduce your ink costs. Don’t overlook the obvious; it always amazes us how often this happens. Here are some important cost-saving measures: proper selection of mesh; proper mesh tension; proper squeegee selection; and appropriate equipment settings.

Just to illustrate what a difference mesh selection can make to ink cost, look at these results that we produced using Wilflex’s Ink Management System (IMS). We entered all the variables to determine the cost per print (ink type, print size, % coverage, mesh count). We did our comparison by changing just one variable, the mesh count.

When we went from a 110 mesh to a 158 mesh we cut our ink cost by 37%. Then when we moved up to a 196 mesh we cut it by a further 15%. We moved up to 230 mesh and cut the per-print ink cost by another 25%. Our model showed that the ink cost using 110 mesh was more than twice as much as the ink cost when using 230 mesh.

Even though, in the end, the ink cost is mere pennies per print, it is worth considering your mesh counts and using higher counts wherever possible. Aside from the ink saving, your prints will be softer, which is very “in” right now.

And what exactly do we mean by pennies-per-print? Well, in our model we assumed a solid 12 inch by 12 inch print covered 100%. And the cost in the worst case using 110 mesh was just over 10 cents per print which we brought down to just over 4 cents per print using the 230 mesh. Oh, and the pricing? That was at the latest prices adjusted upwards for the latest exchange rates.

Screenflex cannot do anything for you with regard to the international money market and the cost of a U.S. dollar. But we can bring you quality products, efficient friendly service and competent technical support; all at just pennies per print.

Some ink manufacturers have just woken up to the fact that governments and customers are beginning to focus on eco-friendly screen printing ink. Now they are announcing eco-friendly ink like they have just invented something new. But as with most new developments in textile screen printing inks, Wilflex is still way ahead of the game, just as they were when they were the first to take lead out of plastisol ink 25 years ago. 

Kathleen’s t-shirt is printed with eco-friendly Wilflex ink that has been available for eight years all over the world!

Wilflex Quantum One does not include phthalates or PVC resin, yet it prints and cures like conventional palstisol-based inks. It also delivers the same high-quality performance and PANTONE colours you would expect from other Wilflex colour systems.

Wilflex Oasis is a line of water-based inks that does not include phthalates, PVC or AEPO’s and it meets the Oeko Tex 100 standard. The Oasis line also includes non-formaldehyde discharge inks.

Wilflex Epic ink system provides you with the most advanced non-phthalate ink technology for market conditions and certification standards that require non-phthalate inks. The Epic system is based on Wilflex’s popular MX mixing system that gives you consistent PANTONE colours.

Want to know more about eco-friendly inks? Don’t waste time with immitators and be careful of salespeople who claim to have “organic”, “green” or “enviro” inks without knowing what they are talking about. Don’t be some no-name brand’s guinea pig, call Screenflex toll-free at 1-800-661-7766 or email us at info@screenflex.ca We know a lot, but if you manage to stump us, we always have the full resources of Wilflex’s experts to back us up.

Oh, one more thing…   we have samples.

This shirt from the Screenflex collection was commissioned for the 1995 SGIA show by Stretch Devices of Philadelphia, manufacturers of the world famous Newman roller frame. 

Screenflex still regards the artist, Bob Parr, as one of the finest textile screen printing artists that we have ever encountered. This was actually the second show shirt that Bob designed for Stretch Devices. The first was for the 1994 show in New Orleans after Screenflex introduced Bob to Stretch Devices. Appropriately, he made an alligator the feature of the New Orleans design and Don Newman liked it so much that he wanted the alligator in the design for the show shirt for the next year in Los Angeles as well.

The initial L.A. design was a tyically brilliant Bob Parr piece, but it did not make it onto the Stretch Devices show shirt because of copyright concerns. The alligator, dressed as a swish L.A. playboy, had an arm around a laughing Marilyn Monroe against a backdrop of L.A. landmarks. A framed print of the design is in the Screenflex collection of industry memorabelia and hangs in the Calgary office. Thankfully, so far we haven’t had a visit from the Marilyn Monroe copyright attorneys.

Another interesting historical feature about this shirt is that the1995 show was the first under the association’s new name. Prior to 1995 it had been known as the Screen Printing Association International (SPAI). In 1995 it became known as the Screenprinting & Graphic Imaging Association International (SGIA). Then in about 2004 it bacame known as the Specialty Graphic Imaging Association. Still the SGIA, but after 10 years the abbreviation finally matched the name and “screen printing” was dropped from the name of the association that was once its own. So, we can say that this 1995 shirt marks the beginning of the metamorphasis of the SPAI to today’s SGIA.

You want to add foil to a print, but only part of it. And you want the convenience of doing the whole print in plastisol. You’ve seen great plastisol prints that incorporate foil in part without having to use water based ink for the non-foiled parts. You want to do them too. But how?

You can do it the slow frustrating way by carefully cutting the foil to a size just big enough to cover the area you want to foil and then positioning it very carefully on the heat press. But you are not a hobbyist with unlimited time. You are in production and at the end of the day you have to show a profit. The trouble is that this slow process might result in nice prints but it is not production friendly at all.

Well there is a quicker and easier way to do it. A small amount of an additive known as Wilflex Foil Resist added to the plastisol inks that you do not want the foil to stick to, will speed the production process up a whole lot (and give your artist much more lattitude). The foil only sticks where you want it to and you end up with prints to impress your customers with much less production hassle.

Want to know more? Call Screenflex toll-free at 1-800-661-7766 or email info@screenflex.ca.

After 16 years of having Cassie at Screenflex every day, we took some time to adjust to her death in March. Her failing heart was the main problem but she also had other issues related to injuries incurred in her trial days. If Jack Russells are allowed to do what they do best and go at life really hard with no holding back, it inevitably catches up with them as they get older. Cassie went at it hard and had a full Jack Russell life.

Ryley took her absence harder than anyone else, which I suppose was to be expected because she was his constant companion for all of his twelve years. The vet predicted that he would “mourn” for about a month and would then slowly adjust to being on his own. That is exactly what happened and although he has come out of the funk that he was in, there are still days when he seems to be much more subdued than he generally was when Cassie was still around.

The photograph was taken while we were preparing for a trial day on a farm near Carstairs, Alberta. Cassie is on the left in the picture in a typically alert Jack Russell pose. She was always looking for action.

It was sixteen years of constant motion, companionship, fun and rodent control.

“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

As we mentioned in an earlier article, Promotional Products Plus of Calgary, are doing great things with Wilflex Oasis discharge inks. Here Kathleen is showing two of their designs. Besides being on the edge graphically, the prints have a really soft hand, something that the current apparel market is demanding.  

The ”Rib Cage” design that she is wearing has been discharged to reveal the natural colour of the garment before it was dyed.  The red and the liquid silver aspects of the design were printed stright down over the top of the Wilflex Oasis Plascharge ink in the first screen after it had been flashed. The images that we have here do not do the silver and red justice; both are bright and vibrant, much more so than the images show.

Rob Riddell says that the Wilflex Oasis Plascharge in the first screen was printed through 156 mesh. The Wilflex red in the second screen was printed through 156 mesh and the Wilflex Liquid Silver was printed through 110 mesh. All were just single hits. The image below will give you a closer look. 

We should add a quick reminder that screens used for discharge printing should be coated with Ulano’s QT Discharge emulsion.

The second shirt, the one that Kathleen is holding, is a soft white print on black. This can be achieved in a number of ways. For printers without gas dryers, we recommend a 50/50 mixture of Wilflex MX White and Wilflex Oasis Plascharge and 6% Wilflex Oasis Discharge Activator added just prior to printing. Rob says that this one was hit twice in a hit/flash/hit sequence through 110 mesh. 

Now all of this can be done without stinking the place out with a rotten egg smell and without dealing with the formaldehyde and heavy metals associated with other discharge systems.  If you want to know more about printing with Wilflex’s Oasis discharge system call Screenflex toll-free at 1-800-661-7766 or email info@screenflex.ca and ask for the very cool “Coloured-hair flyer” that describes the Wiflex Oasis platisol discharge system.

Want to see more of Promotional Products Plus discharge designs? Check out their web site at www.logoitplus.com If for some reason you don’t want to do discharge printing but would like to have some done (particularly large format prints in limited numbers) Rob and Riley would be happy to talk to you. Their contact information is on their web site.  

This week we are showing three of the Rock ‘n Roll shirts from the Screenflex collection.

Kathleen is wearing a Dire Straits shirt featuring Mark Knopfler from their 1992 “On Every Street” European tour. According to the tour itenerary printed on the back, they performed in 43 cities. That was their last tour befor disbanding in 1995.  

To her right is the Led Zeppelin shirt that dates back to the release of their ”Physical Graffitti” album in 1975. As reported in an earlier article, a similar Led Zeppelin t-shirt sold on auction in New York late last year for about $1,625.00.

The Eric Clapton shirt to Kathleen’s left was printed in London, England by Things who were well known for their superb rock ‘n roll shirts. As far as we can recall, this shirt was printed in the early 1990’s not long after the tragic death of his son Conor in 1991. However, if our facts need straightening out, please feel free to let us know at info@screenflex.ca

Next week we’ll feature three tees from the Screenflex collection that record historical sports events.

If you are a textile screen printer and you have customers asking about “environmentally friendly”, “organic” or “green” garments and inks, you may just be interested in a presentation that a PolyOne executive of their Wilflex ink division recently gave.

He made the point that while people asked for “green” they could seldom explain what that meant. For instance, did they mean “organic”, “non-phthalate”, “non-PVC”, all of those things, or something else entirely? He emphasised the importance of questioning anyone asking for “green” as to what exactly they meant.

California is the first state in the U.S. and, at this time, still the only state clearly defining “green” to some concrete extent by specifically prohibiting certain chemicals effective January 1, 2009. We’ll spare you the chemical names and definitions here, but we can forward the information that we have if you call us toll-free at 1-800-661-7766 or email us at info@screenflex.ca  The important point though is that Wilflex already has three ink types to deal with the various “green” demands that your customers might have.

The Wilflex Epic Series is a non-phthalate ink. Wilflex  QuantumOne is a non-phthalate, non-PVC, acrylic-based ink. Wilflex Oasis is a complete line of water-based inks including non-formaldehyde discharge inks to inks for contemporary fashion-driven textured effects.

As far as “organic” garments are concerned, we are told that very few cottons are organically grown and that at this time the only truly “organic” cotton is grown on a limited scale in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. We suggest that next time anybody claims to have “organic” garments, you ask them where the cotton was grown and to provide proof that it was organically grown.

As we have suggested in another article in this newsletter, beware of the ill-informed or the unscrupulous who will miss-represent themselves or their products as “green”. Beware of Greenfarce.   

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