From swimsuits and leggings to rash guards and fanny packs, we’ve got all the items
you need to start your clothing line, on-demand and without any upfront investments.
Sounds exciting.
Well, before you hop to Printful’s product catalog, let me show you an exclusive look
into how we control the quality of your next all-over print product in this episode of
Ask Printful.
Hi, I’m Elizabete from Printful.
This is part three of our behind-the-scenes tour in the Latvian fulfillment center with
our in-house expert Sergejs.
This time we’ll go over some of the quirks of all-over printing and show you a live demo
of how all-over print yoga leggings are made.
Let's get to it.
So we’ve got one more process to go through, and we’re going to look at our all-over
print clothing.
So what we’re doing now, we’re printing the sublimation inks on the transfer paper
that we’ll later use to print on the fabric.
What you can see here is that sublimation inks are printed on the transfer paper, and
it basically acts like a sponge that’s holding the ink until we can get to the heat press,
and apply the ink on the fabric.
Here, you can also see the color wedges that we’re using to measure stability of the
printing, and check that the colors are exactly the same every time we’re printing them.
It’s called all-over printing because we’re printing on the full width of the fabric roll,
compared to the sublimation process for other products like flip-flops, for example, where
we’re printing the product design on a sheet of paper.
We then apply this paper on the flip-flop and do the sublimation process.
So sublimation is the technique, and then all-over print is kind of a product type.
Exactly.
Okay.
Gotcha.
What you see here is a blank material that’s fed to the heat press.
Here’s our printed paper.
They’re coming together in a heat press, and that’s how the ink is transferred on
the fabric.
Here you can see that this is the final printed graphic on the fabric.
And what do we do to control sublimation quality?
Process itself is really complex.
All this complexity means that if something in the process goes wrong, we need to catch
where it happened, fix it, and redo the entire process.
Okay.
Sounds complicated.
Does fabric type affect it in any way?
The most important thing is the base color of the fabric because in nature there is no
such a thing as absolute white or pure white color.
Everything is in greenish, yellowish, and bluish tones.
It means when we’re sublimating on some fabric, we need to keep in mind what is the
base color of this fabric.
Leggings fabric, for example, is really bright, it’s bright blue.
Backpack fabric is a little bit more yellowish.
So, if we print the same design on both fabrics, they will not look the same under the same
lighting because the fabrics themselves are in different tones.
So what we can see here is that we’re cutting out our printed fabric into the pieces that
will be sewn together.
Ok, Sergejs.
Thank you for your time.
I think we learned a lot today.
And I guess the only question left is what should our customers do if something happens,
if something fails in the quality control?
So is there a way for customers to contact us to fix something?
We’re trying to control all the processes but of course errors are possible.
In any case, if any error happens or a customer feels that there is some mistake done with
their order, they need to contact our customer support and mention what product was ordered
or when it was ordered, and provide as much detailed and specific information as they
can.
As well as provide some images.
We’re controlling the processes, and we’re logging the processes on how we’re producing
customer orders.
This way we can go back and look, was it a problem with, let’s say, damaged fabric,
or it was a problem with the process itself, or maybe it was weather conditions that caused
some error in our machines, and then, of course, we’ll try to fix it.
All right.
Sounds good.
Now that you learned what sublimation printing is and how products with this technique are
made, all that’s left for you to do is create your own.
Head over to printful.com, choose your favorite all-over print product from our catalog, and
add your design.
You don't even need any graphics apps for your visuals.
We got you covered with our Design Maker, where you can make custom pattern designs
in a few clicks.
I left a link for the tutorial in the description.
You can always contact our professional graphic design team to help you bring your ideas to
life.
This concludes our three episode tour of our fulfillment center.
But we’re not stopping here.
There are other videos that will come out in the future under these series, so make
sure to subscribe to get notified when they come out.
If there are any other things you wish to ask Printful, you can do so in the comments.
Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time.