Shooting for Basketball Printing Profits
Dec/110
The NBA Strike has been settled, college and high school basketball has begun and local recreational teams are getting started as well. Now is the time to help these teams with uniforms and apparel.
We can help you uniform the team to start. Reversible jerseys are especially easy with custom transfers. See our new video! Most basketball uniforms only use the digits 0-5 when numbering keeping your costs low—a pack of each digit will number an entire team! Don’t forget to offer printed bags, all basketball players carry their shoes to the court and our CAD-PRINTZ™ Opaque work great on the popular nylon cinch bags.
Reversible jerseys are easy with custom transfers.
Even greater profits are available from spirit wear. We have 120 layouts ready to customize for your team’s fans. Use Easy View™ to make the team up a flyer to pass out to family members.
Apparel Terms to Help with Heat Transfers
Nov/111
Terms used when ordering apparel can be confusing. A special thank you to team member Andy Curtiss who did some research on what they mean and how it comes into play when applying heat transfers.
Denier– A unit of measurement that indicates how fine the weave of a material. Specifically, denier references to the weight of a fiber. For example, 1 denier = 1 gram per 9,000 meters of a fiber. So this means that the higher the number, the heavier the weight of the fibers used. A lightweight garment has a lower denier. For example, a woman’s nylons could be 7 denier. But a heavy duty nylon awning could be 1,000 denier. This does not affect heat printing.
Moisture Wicking – This term refers to some fabrics abilities to absorb sweat from your skin and pull it through to the outside of the garment. This leaves your skin dry and comfortable and allows the sweat to evaporate more quickly. Both nylon and polyester have the capacity to wick moisture as noted above. This term alone has no effect on the adhesion of our product as it is NOT a special coating, but a natural ability of some fibers.
Dri-Fit, Aerocool and Cool Mesh – These are trademarked or brand terms that refer to a type of jersey in which nylon or polyester has been mixed with cotton or another natural fiber. These garments are advertised as not only good at wicking away sweat, but the added natural fibers like cotton make the garment more breathable and comfortable, allowing a person to cool down more quickly. So when dealing with these garments, we will always need to ask: polyester or nylon.
Porthole, Mini, & Micro Mesh – These are all terms that simply refer to the size of the holes and the denier (weight) of the mesh fabric. All three can either refer to polyester mesh or nylon mesh. The largest holes with the heaviest denier are generally the porthole mesh which is used for some football jerseys or mesh laundry bags. In contrast, the micro mesh has tiny holes and smaller denier and it is used for basketball and lacrosse jerseys. Mini mesh is between the other two and can be used in any of the sports previously mentioned as well as soccer. When a customer mentions any of these products we should immediately ask if it’s nylon or polyester and make the appropriate transfer type choices from there – don’t ever assume!
Tricot Mesh – Tricot is a term that refers to a style of knitting or weaving. The tricot style will generally leave one side of a garment smooth and the other side textured. Tricot mesh is this style of weave used in a mesh jersey. These are often times a higher end jersey in the sports world (it is also used in undergarments and sleeping bags). Tricot mesh comes in both polyester and nylon varieties so we need to ask when customers mention it – don’t assume!
Performance Wear – A garment that is worn close to the skin because of its wicking properties. Performance wear is made to be tight, but flexible so it can be worn under a uniform or as a uniform itself in some sports. Some performance wear is worn as a loose fit. These garments can be decorated with any of our products that are appropriate for polyester. However, other performance wear is referred to as compression fit. These garments are worn skin tight and will generally stretch to some degree. For this fit you should use Elasti Prints® or CAD-PRINTZ™. You will hear the terms moisture wicking, dri-fit and aerocool occasionally in conjunction with performance wear (see above for their definition).
Sublimation – A high end process of decorating garments that involves dying the garment with a gas process. Garments are polyester and start the process as white or very light grey. After the sublimation process is complete, the garment will show a different color(s) on the outside, but still show the original white or light grey on the inside. The only catch to the process is that it easily suffers from dye migration (see below). The only transfer type that can be safely used is CAD-PRINTZ Sub Block.
Sub Block on a Sublimated Shirt
Choosing Your Custom Transfer Product-Your Apparel Will Make Your Choice
Nov/110
When choosing what custom transfer to use, one of the most important factors is what apparel type your customer is requesting. If your customer wants to order a nylon jacket, your product choice is limited to the only product that works on nylon—CAD-PRINTZ™ Opaque. If your customer wants a compression fit polyester material, your product choices are CAD-PRINTZ Opaque and Elasti Prints®.
Shown here is a CAD-PRINTZ digital transfer used to decorate a compression fit polyester material.
If your customer wants a custom printed t-shirt, or anything cotton, polyester or cotton/poly blends your choices are unlimited. You will then need to consider if it is full color (digital product line) or spot color (screen printed transfer line). Another factor to consider is quantity. You can order as few as 1 of the digital transfers, but there is a 5 piece minimum when ordering the screen printed transfers using our layouts, or 10 if providing art.
Our customer service team will help you get the best product at the best price for your job.
Transfers Offer Solution For Hard-To-Decorate Items
Sep/110
Almost everyone is familiar with the fact that transfers are a great decorating medium for just about any type of apparel that is made of cotton, polyester, or a cotton/poly blend.
What you may not realize is that Transfer Express offers two distinct types of transfers: screen printed and digital. Screen printed transfers are limited to the traditional cotton and polyester fabrics, but digital transfers such as CAD-PRINTZ™ Opaque will go on almost anything you can fit in a heat press and can be created in unlimited colors.
This opens the doors to a much wider range of apparel and promotional items including nylon team uniforms, umbrellas, swim suits, and leather goods.
When Illinois Glove Co., Northbrook, Ill., was looking for a solution to print full-color logos on gloves for its promotional product customers, CAD-PRINTZ™ turned into a great solution for the company.
Prior to using Transfer Express, the manufacturer was screen printing one-color logos onto gloves. “Screen printing was a mess,” notes Jay Shmikler, director of sales and marketing. “Because the glove was made of a knit fabric, the print would fall into the little mesh holes. We could do only one color with screen printing, and then we lost out on orders to other products that could offer multiple color logos.”
Today, the company uses Easy Prints for one-color orders and CAD PRINTZ for full-color logos. Another reason digital transfers have been such a great match is the wide range of materials that gloves are made of.
“We offer gloves for automotive, construction, farm, ranch, trucking companies, freezer gloves for people who are stocking shelves in the grocery stores, and safety awards; you name it, we have probably done it,” says Shmikler.
So when choosing a decorating process, it’s important to match the right method to the glove material.
“We have certain types of gloves that we use Easy Prints,” says the director. “If the glove stretches, we have to make sure we get Easy Prints because that stretches. If the logo has a lot of detail, we use CAD-PRINTZ. So when someone comes to us with an eight-color logo, CAD-PRINTZ looks amazing. You can get shading that you really can’t get in a screen printed transfer.”
As a steady customer for the past four years, Shmikler has been satisfied with the product and the customer service. “They are good at returning calls, they are professional and they’re easy to deal with.”
If you have a customer come in with a hard-to-decorate item, next time, don’t turn them away. Investigate if using a digital transfer may be the perfect solution!
Switching from direct screen printing to screen printed and digital transfers solved several embellishing challenges for Illinois Glove Co. faced when decorating gloves for promotional product clientele. Photo courtesy of Illinois Glove Co., Northbrook, Ill.
Decorator Converts Home Into Shop, Showroom & Tiki Bar
Jul/110
When most decorators want to entertain a client, they might take them out to a nice local restaurant. But Tim Hoffman, owner, Hoffman Embroidery, had a better idea. He built a tiki bar.
After paying big rent at the Annapolis Mall in Annapolis, Maryland, for years, Hoffman and his partner decided they’d had enough of that. So the embroiderer, who lives in a three-level house, gutted 1,000 feet on the first floor and built his shop, a showroom, and an outdoor tiki bar instead. It’s now home to his one singlehead, one four-head, and two two-head embroidery machines and two Stahls’ Hotronix heat transfer presses.
The tiki bar garnered media attention from a local newspaper The Capital, Annapolis, Md., November 13, 2010 issue and March/April 2011 issue of Stitches magazine where it was the cover story.
“It looks just like a tiki bar you’d see on the beach in the British Virgin Islands,” says Hoffman. “We have water in the back yard. It’s enclosed in the wintertime so we can use it year-round.”
Although Hoffman doesn’t sell drinks, it’s used for entertaining clients and friends for all kinds of occasions. “It looks like a real bar, and we have mixed drinks,” he notes. “We throw big neighborhood parties and watch all the big sporting events. It’s a perfect man cave.”
In addition to offering embroidery, Hoffman also is a regular customer of Transfer Express. When he gets multi-color print jobs, he has found transfers the best way to go. “When we get an eight-color job for a dark shirt, if you screen print it, that’s eight screens plus a white underbase. When it’s a left-chest size design for 100 shirts, the only cost-effective way to do it is using Transfer Express CAD-PRINTZ™.”
“We’ve used them for a multitude of orders, and they have always done a great job with outstanding service at a price that is affordable,” says Hoffman. “We also get quick turnaround. We’re glad to have them on our team.”
Owner Tim Hoffman and production manager Amy Lynn Hall sit on a stool in the outdoor tiki bar that is used to entertain clients throughout the year. Hoffman built it at the same time he transformed the first floor of his three-story house into his shop and showroom.
Vector vs Raster Art: Which is Best for Transfers?
Jun/110
Vector vs Raster Art:
There are basically two different types of art – vector and raster (bitmap/jpg). Both are useful depending on your end use.
Raster art is made up of tiny boxes known as pixels. An example of a raster image is a digital photograph. Typically, rasterized files end with file extensions such as .jpg, .tif, .bmp, .gif, and .png. One of the most common mistakes made with raster art has to do with scaling (sizing) a rasterized image larger. Since raster art is resolution dependent, you can scale smaller, but you shouldn’t scale larger. This is because there are only so many pixels in the image. Raster images are measured by their dpi (dots per [linear] inch). A crisp, high resolution image will be around 300 pixels per inch. When scaling larger, the same amount of pixels remain, but over a larger area. Therefore, if you scale a high resolution (300 dpi) photo twice the size, you now only have 150 pixels per inch, which is half the resolution previously. When scaling larger, the pixels per inch decreases, which in turn makes the resolution decrease. This creates the distorted and pixilated look.
When zoomed in on raster artwork, you can see the pixels that create the image.
Vector art, on the other hand, is not resolution dependent. You can scale it larger or smaller and it will still look the same. Vector art can be used on a golf ball or the same art can be used on a billboard and either one will look clear. This type of art uses mathematical formulas to create the artwork. There are no pixels involved. Instead, it uses points and curves to create shapes. This type of artwork is created in applications such as CorelDraw and Adobe Illustrator, which can have file extensions such as .cdr, .ai, and .eps.
When zoomed in on vector artwork, lines and curves are smooth.
How does this all fit in to our transfers?
Rasterized artwork is fine for our CAD-PRINTZ™ digital transfers as long as it is high resolution at full size (300 dpi or higher). Also for our digital transfers, vector artwork is perfectly acceptable as well.
If you are interested in our screen printed transfers, the printing process differs some. In this case, you can send us raster artwork, however, it will only be used as a guide from which the artwork will be recreated. Vector art is preferred for screen printing.
How to Prep Your Own Artwork for CAD-PRINTZ Printing
May/110
RGB Vs. CMYK Color Mode:
We make it easy for our customers by providing all the artwork you could ever imagine with Easy Prints® layouts and clipart, which the selection continues to grow each year. However, sometimes your customers provide their own artwork or maybe you have come up with some very nice artwork yourself. In these cases, one of the most common questions that re-occur has to do with the color mode of the artwork files. The color mode of your artwork file is basically the colors that your artwork is rendered in its end use. To determine which color mode you want, you must know your end use for the artwork. There are various color modes, while RGB and CMYK are the most common.
RGB (standing for Red, Green, Blue) is a color mode used by computer monitors, televisions, and any sort of electronic screen. All of the colors you see on the screen are actually made up of various combinations of tiny red, green and blue “boxes” known as pixels. This is also the color mode used by all internet graphics. If you are making any artwork for the web or any other project that will be viewed on a monitor, you would want to use RGB as the color mode.
However, RGB is not a color mode meant for printing. CMYK (standing for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key (Black)) is the other main color mode which is meant for printing. By combining different percentages of the ink colors, cyan, magenta, yellow and black, a wide variety of other colors are created. This is the method used by your ink jet printer at home all the way to commercial printing presses. CMYK is also known as “full color”, “4-color” or “process color” printing. We use CMYK as the color mode to print all of our CAD-PRINTZ™. This includes all of the digital transfers, wall graphics, banners, stickers and window clings. If you try to print artwork that is RGB using CMYK, the colors will not be consistent and will most likely be very different from how they appear on your computer screen. Therefore, if you are sending us artwork for any CAD-PRINTZ™ product, we need the color mode in CMYK.
Changing the color mode of your artwork file depends on the computer application you are using. Please check your users guide for your particular application that you are using for details.
RGB and CMYK Color Model
Custom Stickers-Beyond Just Helmets
Apr/110
Our custom printed stickers are great for all types of sports helmets. The stickers are printed on a thin vinyl and are durable, water and fade resistant making them perfect for many other uses. Here are some suggestions for additional sales:
- Water Bottles – dishwasher safe, great add on sale for sports teams!
- Mugs and Glassware – great for prom, party and wedding favors
- Hang Tags – advertise your own business easily
- Scrapbooks – for both covers and put packs together as an add on sale
- Notebooks – Sell to your school’s bookstore
- Skateboards and Bikes
- Phones/IPod/MP3 Players/Laptop – perfect for schools and teams
Custom stickers are great for helmets... plus much more!
Stickers are great for teams' water bottles too!
Students put custom stickers on school supplies such as this binder
Custom Stickers can be cut for electronic devices such as this Apple iPod
Skateboards and other extreme sports are popular places for stickers too!
Win the Bid with our Bid Sample Kit!
Mar/110
We have created a sample product to help you win every bid! Our new bid sample kit is printed with our full color Cad-Printz™ opaque so you can use the samples on any color, and almost any product—including tshirts, caps, golf shirts, nylon bags, neoprene ad specialty items, and umbrellas. With just a heat press, and the bid kit, you can show your customers a wide array of items they will be able to order from you, custom printed in full color.
The Bid Sample Kit includes:
- 2 – 4×4” prints
- 2 – 3×3” prints
- 4 – 2×2” prints
- 6 – 1×1” prints
- All for just $25! Or split the sample kit into two logos for just $35.
Our new Bid Kit will be featured as part of the webinar in April titled Winning Your Customer’s T-Shirt Printing Business. Don’t miss out!
Get Bids for Jobs using our Bid Kit from your design
4 Colors in 4 Seconds—see it in Atlantic City
Mar/111
Visit us at the Atlantic City Imprinted Sportswear Show this weekend and not only will you be able to see 4 colors printed in 4 seconds, you will be able to do it yourself and wear your free t-shirt you just printed!
Also, watch or participate in our hourly number race. Two contestants will number 10 shirts in less than 4 minutes (if they are as fast as others who have tried!) The winner of each race wins $100 in free Transfer Express product, and everyone that participates gets an Easy Prints® number Express Pack!
We will also have samples of all of our new products—stickers, banners, wall graphics, Pearl Prints, our new full color Cad-Printz™ products and the Cad-Printz bid kit.
The show is March 11-13 at the Atlantic City Convention Center. Show hours are 10-5 Friday and Saturday and 10-3 on Sunday. See you there!
Press a t-shirt in 4 seconds with a Heat Press!
