Be One of a Kind – Create Your Own Custom T-Shirts
Feb/120
Have you seen the latest commercial from Dr. Pepper? In it they show many different people with their original custom phrases declaring who they are. You can do this too!
Dr. Pepper commercial with unique t-shirts
Those shown in the commercial use the Cooper font, a font available from Transfer Express, and layout QAL-2, two straight lines of text or QAL-153, three straight lines of text. To create your own, visit www.TransferExpress.com, login in, click “View Layouts” and enter QAL-2. Change the text to your original phrase, choose Cooper font, or any of over 100 fonts, and choose your shirt and ink color and view. There is your original phrase!
Use Easy View™ to preview your custom shirt
Create a unique, one of a kind t-shirt with Easy Prints® or Express Names™
5 More Custom Transfer Layouts and a New Binder Catalog
Jan/120
Which do you like the best? Vote for your favorites on our blog! All 15 of our Great Dane Graphics sneak peeks are shown online and we are looking for your feedback.
New All Sports Layout QAP-46
New Cheerleading Layout QCH-132
New Football Layout QFB-153
New Fire Layout QLW-60
New Music Layout QMU-85
We will screen-print your design, and ship the same day if you order a one color transfer by 11 am EST, and in just 2 days for a multi-color transfer. Once your custom transfer is received it can be applied to your apparel in just seconds with a heat press. There is not an easier way to create custom apparel. You are creating your customer’s apparel without the need for art skills or programs, or expensive and messy screen printing equipment.
Like what you see? These and many others are available in the new personalized binder Idea Book™. The binder catalog gives you a great presentation when you meet with potential customers and is a great companion to the online Easy View™. It is the iron-on industry’s largest, filled with thousands of customizable layouts. The book is color coded in sections including fashion, occasions, school, business and sports. Each section is started with full color photos showing the potential for completed apparel on models. The binder cover is personalized with a one line personalization of your choice giving you a professional sales tool.
First Sneak Peek of Great Dane Designs To Create Your Custom Transfers
Jan/120
Here are the first five designs of the new Easy Prints® customizable layout collection from Great Dane Graphics. These are now orderable and can be customized for your needs using Easy View™, our free design tool for all Transfer Express dealers.
The first five designs include a layout from our recreation, mascot, religion, all star and basketball sections. But the section is just a starting point and the layout can be customized to fit your specific needs. If you love the look of the basketball layout but want it for your baseball team—just change the basketball player to a baseball player and the text to fit your needs.
Get creative with colors too! You can show your customer the same design in 1 color or 2 colors but more can be added – just put what other colors are needed and the color placement in notes and our design team will make it happen.
These five designs will be five of the choices for the ‘vote for your favorite design’ on January 18th. Three lucky voters will win $50 towards their own order.
New Recreation Layout QMS-113
New All Star Layout QAS-113
New Mascots Layout MAS-141
New Religion Layout QRE-70
New Basketball Layout QBK-180
Choose Your Favorite New Custom Transfer Layout!
Jan/120
We are excited to be able to provide you with the not only the largest collection of customizable layouts, but also the best. This year we have added over 200 new layouts to our Easy Prints® customizable transfer layout collection, giving your customer thousands of choices and giving you the ability to provide artwork with just a few clicks.
Beginning this week, we will be giving you a sneak peak of some of these layouts by Great Dane Graphics, a new member of the Stahls’ team, whose artwork is now part of the Easy Prints custom transfer layout collection. These new Easy Prints provide your customer with the look similar to what you find in the fashion retail stores like Abercrombie, Hollister and The Buckle!
Each Wednesday we will release five of the new layouts. As they are released they will be orderable online and viewable customized on our Easy View™ design tool, free to all Transfer Express dealers.
In mid January you will get to vote on which of the 20 layouts is your favorite. And three lucky voters will win $50 towards their own order! So be sure to watch each week and exercise your right to vote for your chance to win.
Creating Custom Halloween Transfers
Oct/110
In a previous blog we introduced our new Extreme Halloween stock prints and showed you how to customize with name drops. There were five different design choices, all in full color, but sometimes your customer wants something that is all their own, and Easy View™ can help you create a print to meet their needs.
By using the Halloween clip art and your own text, you can customize any of the Easy Prints® layouts.
Don’t limit yourself to just the Holiday section-any of the thousands of professionally created layouts can be customized for Halloween with the use of clip art and your choice of text. In the examples, we used layouts from the Alternative Fashion, Anywear, Basketball and Holiday sections, just using holiday clip art and text to fit the event. Be creative with your text using fun phrases your customer might like.
Is your customer looking for a print for a children’s Halloween party? Order a one color print, press on a white shirt and provide fabric markers to use as the party craft. One customer told me they just provided washable markers and the kids were thrilled that when washed the coloring was removed and they could start all over again!
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.
Are you ready for some football T-shirt profits?
Sep/110
The team is playing, but is your store ready for the sales? If you don’t have the time or talent to create art, don’t worry, our design team will have you on the field in no time.
Easy Prints® football layout QFB-146
One of our customers sent this photo a couple of weeks ago saying his sales were a touchdown! It is our football layout QFB-146 with his team’s motivational saying added. A lot of teams will use an inspirational quote during the season and this particular layout allows you to add it easily. It took him just seconds to create using the online Easy View, and it has been selling for weeks. We have 150 different football layouts ready for you to customize.
Custom Matching T-shirts for Girls and Their Dolls
Aug/110
Vacations are a great time for relaxation but also inspiration. I love seeing all the custom t-shirt designs and sayings when in a new city. On a recent trip to Chicago while waiting for my teenage son to get up, I ventured to the American Girl® store. As the mother of two sons, this is foreign territory for me and I was amazed at the store. There are floors full of dolls, doll clothing and accessories, a restaurant for you and your doll and even a doll salon.
One of their new lines is a great idea for our customers who market to girls such as dance teams, camps, cheerleading groups, and sports teams. They had an area where you chose a stock design and a matching shirt is created for both the girl and the doll. You can take this to the next level with custom printed shirts for girl and doll. Those little shirts would be a great add on sale or a way to differentiate you from the competition. And a perfect use for those extra prints you can fit on a screen printed transfer gang sheet (a sheet printed with more than one image)!
Create Custom Matching Doll T-shirts for Girls
Tips for Screen Printing Custom Artwork: Tip 1 – Software to Create Artwork
Jul/110
Transfer Express’ collection of clip art and layouts is very extensive and continues to grow each year. That being said, you don’t have to be an artist to order our designs. Simply customize and order our Easy Prints® layouts. However, we are seeing an increase in the amount of uploaded art to our web site for custom orders – Easy Prints® Plus. In this new series of blogs, we will give you the Top 5 Tips for Screen Printing Custom Artwork to help make your experience the best possible for submitting custom artwork to us.
The first tip this week starts at the beginning. It deals with software for creating and/or editing custom artwork. There are many programs you may use to do this, however, there are really two main programs we would suggest using – CorelDraw® or Adobe Illustrator®. These programs are great in the graphic arts industry including art for screen printing.
Create custom artwork for screen printing in CorelDraw (left) or Illustrator (right).
The Graphic Software
CorelDraw and Illustrator are programs that professionals use. However, you can learn them just as easily. Both of the creators of these programs allow you to download a free 30 day trial. This gives you a free opportunity to play with the programs and get your feet wet. Test out each program to see which one you may prefer. Spending a few minutes in the program everyday will allow you to get accustomed to it and by the end of the 30 day trial, you may have decided that yes, this is something you can do and would like to purchase.
Resources
While learning the programs, there are many resources online for free to help you if you get stuck on a particular problem. Search the internet or YouTube, and there are many videos and tutorials to view for almost any situation in either of these two programs.
Great info at:
AdvancedArtist.com
Sending Us Your Creations
Did you make something you need transfers of? Uploading artwork to our web site is very easy. On the upper navigation tabs, click on the “Send Us Your Artwork” tab. Upon signing in, click on the “Upload File” button. From there, simply fill out the information in the form and browse for your saved artwork file on your computer. And voila, it’s that easy! Once your art is reviewed we will call you to discuss your quote or order.
Get screen printed plastisol and digital transfers made from you artwork
Now go get your free 30 day trial and experiment! Who knows, you may have some skills you never knew you had…
Important Links:
CorelDRAW X5 Information
5 Trends Team Dealers Need To Watch and Tools to Help Meet Those Needs
Jul/110
Decorate your full uniform with Transfer Express - uniform front, names, numbers, helmet stickers
In the July issue of Team Dealer magazine, the top 5 trends team dealers need to watch was listed:
- Rising Importance of Parents
- Rising Importance of Ecommerce
- Shorter Lead Times
- Growth in Stock Uniform Sales
- Spirit Pack Sales Soar
We have many tools to help you meet the needs these new trends create.
Our website becomes your website with our generic site you can use with parents—Easyprints.com. This site has no contact information and can be linked to your own site or used as an online reference for teams and their parents. So, even if you don’t have the budget for your own site, you can make the Easy Prints site your own. Include the site on your own business cards and literature with information on how to order.
Once your customer has used Easy Prints to choose a design, same day shipping is available for single color orders when ordered by 11 AM EST so you can offer your customers the shortest lead times possible. Once the custom transfer is printed, it can be applied to your in stock uniforms in just seconds so your customer is ready for today’s game.
To help with spirit sales we offer pages full of layouts and free online flyers that can be used as is or personalized for a specific team.
We also now offer 6″ 2 color numbers in 34 different color combinations.
