CauseMart's Made To Order Printing Process
The Traditional Way To Apply An Image: Silk screening is a process that has been used for years to apply images to articles of clothing. Colored ink is swiped over a preprocessed screen which allows ink to pass through it to intended areas on a piece of clothing. After it is applied, or screened, the ink is cured. Only one color can be applied at a time. Separate screens are used for each color, so a four color image requires four separate physical screens, and as each color must be run one at a time, it also means four separate applications of ink.
Each screen costs money, but so does the time necessary to setup, screen each color onto the item and clean up the point of production afterwards. A typical silkscreen is about the size of a picture frame. Another drawback to silk screening is that different size items require their own screens; to print an image on a range of shirt sizes requires multiple screens. So storing screens for later use takes a fair amount of space, and adds costs.
As a result, silk screening small quantities and/or multicolor garments is expensive and rarely done. It’s really only practical for orders of a few hundred pieces at a time and designs with only a color or two. That’s great if you are going to sell hundreds of items and you know the exact mix of garment colors and sizes upfront, but if you don’t it means a lot of management, too much and too little inventory, lots of guesswork, and marginal returns.
To summarize, silk-screening is a great, low cost way to order large quantities of a one or two color design on a white tee-shirt. We at CauseMart can do this for you, competitively, but so can any local silk-screener. What sets us apart is our unique Made To Order process and our ability to provide you with your very own online just in time clothing store, and all the benefits it brings – most importantly risk free profits.
CauseMart’s Made To Order Printing: A newly developed technique allows us to apply a full array of colors directly onto clothing without the use of a screen, in a single pass, with a full array of colors.
Our Made to Order printing processapplies an image directly onto a garment through what is essentially a specifically designed, industrial grade, high end ink-jet printer. If you are familiar with this process, you might recall that this technology was initially best suited for lighter garments such as white t-shirts. Our state of the art technology makes CauseMart one of the few companies that can print on light and dark clothing. And we can print on an extremely large area. In addition, our Made To Order process, reduces lead-time, eliminates the need for you to carry inventory, and allows your customers to order a single item at a time in any color, size and design.
Another advantage over silk-screening is resolution. Screen printing yields a maximum resolution of 72 dots per inch (DPI), while the our process can print an image with 8 to 10 times the precision (over 600 DPI) – for near perfect quality – with no halftone dots.
Our process is very consistent, but there are some limitations that are important to understand. Some companies with this type of service don’t have our technology, and others over-sell what theirs can do, they don’t educate people upfront and they don’t inform them when they see an issue. We make sure we take the time to make sure things are setup right, from the beginning. That’s why we’ve got a few extra steps and some restrictions others don’t. We want to make sure you’re happy with the products your customers receive and we want you to be happy with your CauseMart store for years to come.
It’s important to print on dark garments with an extra proprietary underbasing step that we do automatically. But, because it’s an extra step, it adds a little to the price of dark items. Most people don’t mind this too much, but it is something to be aware of. Certain combinations of garment and ink colors can appear to blend together, so some of our customers prefer to underbase on light colors too. The raised look of underbasing is attractive to others and so they do it for both light and dark products.
We can print on virtually any garment, but for best results we recommend a minimum of 90% cotton content. We’ve designed a process that unlike silk-screening automatically sizes your design image to the garments proper size. To do this we need your design file to follow our specific art requirements. To save time, it’s best if you or your artists use this information during the design process, but if that’s a hassle our staff will take care of it for you.
Another thing to understand is that whether we silk-screen or use our Made To Order printing process, the colors you see on your computer screen will not reflect the color imaged on a piece of clothing. We have to “match” the color to your intention. To do this we can either send you a color swatch, or you can send us a garment or another item you’ve made in the past. Once we’ve got the colors of your logo, or design, matched, we’ll use those colors on all your designs, and it will be very consistent.
There are certain products, such as gym bags, that are not flat enough to print reliably. Our print on demand process is capable of printing over seams and zippers, but generally the results are less than desirable.
One of the great things about our process is its ability to print in full color in a single pass, with no additional expense, and without cost prohibitive setup fees (particularly for small runs). So for short runs, multicolor images including photos, and a broad selection of product, our Made To Order process is superior and more cost effective. Our process enables just-in-time delivery of custom apparel without requiring minimum quantities and zero inventory. CauseMart enables one-off production without big set-up costs, screens, and color-layer separation required for traditional screen printing.
Your CauseMart store lets your customers conveniently order any quantity of printed garments at any time. We take care of the ordering and billing, email acknowledging, apparel ordering and stocking, printing, tagging (washing instructions), packing & shipping to your customer, and it only takes a couple of days, without you having to lift a finger, except when it’s time to deposit your checks.
If you would like to have your own CauseMart store, please let us know by calling or contacting us at contact@causemart.com.