Our technology in making your product.

We utilize Direct to Film (DTF) technology. It is a newer technology in the world of apparel making. Admittedly, being a newer technology, it is going through its growing pains. But it has shown to hold lots of benefits and promise, even over some of the more well-known technologies on the market. For example, Direct to Garment (DTG) and Sublimation have issues with the color and material of the substrate. With DTF, we can use any color and most materials as a substrate. And as time goes by, more and more materials are being found as a viable substrate for DTF.

One of the most popular technologies on the market is screen printing. It has a reputation for being a great technology in apparel making. Nobody can argue with that, but it has some difficulties as well. You have to make the screens, store the screens, and you need a new screen for each color. With DTF, there are very few restrictions with the number of colors in the design and we don’t need a lot of space to store the screens.

How DTF works

DTF is quite simple in the basics of how it works. We take your design, make it high resolution, do any modifications if needed, and change the file type to one that we can use.

Then we send it to our DTF printer. It works much like a regular printer except it uses a special DTF ink and it prints onto a transfer paper. The printer heads lay down the design and adds a white base layer on top. The white base layer is important as that is what allows us to print onto any color substrate. We save the design on our computer and can reprint it at any time, no big storage facility is needed. We make sure to use a quality ink in order to make the best design for you.

Once it is printed we add our DTF adhesive powder and bake the image. This is an important part in the process. The quality of the bake and quality of the adhesive powder will affect how well the image adheres to the substrate. Humidity plays a factor with the powder as well. Too much humidity and it clumps, not enough and it doesn’t hold up as well. We only use a quality adhesive powder, keep it in a humidity controlled container, and have dialed in our bake time and temperature to maximize the quality of the bake.

Once the design is baked to perfection, we press it. There are three factors that go into the press of the apparel: time, temperature, and pressure. We have a quality press that holds the temperature well, has a built-in timer to accurately press for as long as we need to, and has consistent pressure over the whole design that we can control for what pressure we need. All three of these change based on the substrate you need. We have done trial and error to find the best combination for time, temperature, and pressure for your needs.