As you may know there are many different types of garment printing these days.
The most common comparison is between traditional screen printing and the
newer direct to garment printing or dtg for short. Sometimes it's not a
black and white answer as to which type of printing is the best for everything.
Hey everyone my name is Wes Tate and i'm with BELLA+CANVAS. To help us understand which type
of printing is best for your business or your specific design, we're visiting Kevin at Stoked
On Printing in Las Vegas, Nevada. If you watch until the end of this video Kevin's going to
cover 5 different printing scenarios that you may run into and which type of printing is going to be
the best fit for each one. Before we get started go ahead and subscribe to our channel and click on
that bell icon that way you never miss new content just like this. Kevin thank you so much for having
us out here today in Las Vegas. I'm excited to be here at Stoked On. Can you tell us a little
bit about Stoked On Printing? Yeah so Stoked On Printing was started in 2011 by my partner
Shane and I. Grew up playing in bands and touring around and so then we started screen printing in
his spare bedroom. Eventually leading into adding embroidery, direct to garment, and then print
on demand eventually. Today's video is all about deciding what's gonna be the best type of printing
for us, going with direct to garment or screen printing. So it's awesome that you offer all
of those services, so you're definitely a great resource on what's going to be the best for us.
Absolutely, so i'm really excited about talking about the difference between direct to garment
and screen printing and the reason why you want to go with one or the othe,r because it's not always
a one-size-fits-all scenario. Right, I'm sure there's different kind of scenarios that you do
want to consider when deciding what's going to be the best one for us. Right, so the first scenario
that you want to think about is the quantity of shirts you're going to be ordering. Whether that's
1 or 1,000 will determine whether you want to go with screen printing or direct to garment. Okay
and why is that, is it cheaper the more shirts you get with one of the printing processes? Exactly.
Right, so the lower you go the more expensive a t-shirt becomes. So at a certain point you
price yourself out of screen pruning and direct to garment becomes way more cost advantageous.
Is there like kind of a magic number that you think about when steering in one direction or
the other? Yeah so with screen printing we usually like to say around 24 or 30 is a really good spot
where you want to start thinking about screen printing. Once you go below that, again your cost
is just going to become a little bit too high where direct to garment is going to be better.
It's just in the setup process. So screen printing has a much more extensive setup process when
you're talking about separating the art, creating the screens, and getting the press set up,
whereas direct to garment uses a digital printer that has no setup process. So if i'm doing a low
quantity number of shirts i'm wanting printed, it's probably going to be best for me to do dtg?
Absolutely, so there's a second scenario in which you're talking about the amount of colors that are
in your design. So if you have too many colors even that low quantity of that 24-30 can still
become a little too expensive and you still might want to think about going with direct to garment.
Per color it costs more with screen printing is that? Right, exactly, yeah so with screen
printing we always price everything off of the amount of colors that are in the design.
With direct to garment it's one flat rate. So whether you have a 1,000 colors in the design
or a couple, it's gonna be the same exact price. So with screen printing we're actually creating an
individual screen per color and that's happening in the artwork separation process and then when
we're creating that screen, whereas with direct-to-garment we're using again a
digital print head that's using cmyk that's essentially blending those colors together
to create a multitude of colors. If you're doing screen printing there's manual labor
and materials that are involved that go into each color that's going? Right that's correct.
Okay we've talked about the number of shirts that we're printing. We've talked about the colors.
What's the next scenario we need to consider? So another scenario is actually personalization. So
as we're getting more and more into individual pieces we're seeing a lot more people wanting
their name or their number on their t-shirt. Versus having the same print on every single
shirt. I see this a lot with ecommerce sites where you can plug in the job title or the person's name
in the design they've created. Exactly. And so that is going to be best for direct to garment?
Yes exactly, and this goes back to the setup process so with screen printing. We'd have to
create an individual screen for each name and whereas, with direct to garment, we don't have
any setup process. So we could do one name, no problem. So the next thing to consider
when you're thinking about direct to garment or screen printing is going to be the fabric?
So with direct to garment you want to stick with a lot more cotton fabric. So 100% cotton is going to
print the best and then as you introduce synthetic fibers, like polyester, it gets becomes harder
and harder to print on. So it has something to do with the pre-treat and the ink that's being used.
You know, in 10 years, it might become a different story but as the case right now in 2021, it's
where it's at with the printing. Okay so this is really something to keep in mind if you just have
your heart set on - it needs to be a tri-blend shirt? Right, yes. Okay, actually one thing
that's really cool that a lot of people don't know about but BELLA+CANVAS works closely with lots of
printers to do testing and to make sure that their polyester materials are giving the best results
possible with dtg. So the BELLA+CAVNAS products are going to give you a better result than
some of the other brands out there that have a tri-blend or a polycotton blend. The 3001 CVC,
we're still getting really good results on printing and having a really good customer
reaction to that. Now if i'm going with screen printing does it really matter or screen printing
it's kind of good to go with whatever? Screen printing is good to go. The reason being is
there's a lot wider array of inks we can use that are formulated for certain fabrics. So we
can interswap those on a job by job basis. So the last thing to consider when you're thinking about
direct to garment and screen printing is going to be specialty inks. So whether you're talking about
glitters, metallics, foils, puff inks, you know, HD gels - all that type of stuff. Which printing
technique can offer that and the other one can't? So that'll be done through screen printing
versus direct to garment because direct to garment again is just a digital printer that's
putting out just regular ink. With screen printing we could put whatever type of ink inside of the
screen so again metallics and foils and all that type of stuff. You can probably also get colors
that you maybe can't really achieve with dtg, is that correct? It's definitely correct. So
with direct to garment you can only do - you can only get so close to colors, whereas with screen
printing we're going to get exact colors. Right, okay, cool so you mentioned like glitter and i
know there's stuff out there like puff paint and yeah kind of like 3d stuff, and especially if you
want like neon colors. That's all,you'll want to go with screen printing is that right? Correct.
Well i know that's probably for sure the deal breaker for a lot of people because sometimes you
just have your heart set on a specific type of ink and outcome that you're you're trying to go with.
Yep, the more creative you want to go screen printing allows for a lot more of that,
whereas with direct to garment it is really great for like that low quantity
high color count. But if you're really looking to push the boundaries you may want to think about
maybe upping that quantity or paying a little bit more per piece to get really exactly what
you want. So with all these variables in mind you really want to just probably reach out to
your local print shop or whoever you buy your stuff through and they can give you a really
good way of knowing which route to go based off of your artwork what you want to print on
and any special effects that you want to add on to it. Kevin, thank you so much for telling us
all that information. I know that probably helps out a lot of people trying to decide what is
going to be the right choice for them, for their design or their business that they're going for.
As you can tell there's lots of variables so hopefully that does help you figure out
what's going to be the right choice for you. And like Kevin said, you can always
reach out to a print shop to go over the cost of everything. If you learned something new today
about dtg and screen printing why don't you let us know about it in the comments below.
Also check out the description for links and all the information on Stoked On Printing.