Printers, T shirts and GSMs

At present the wholesale printwear market focuses on selling products only for the price, which is lowering the quality of the base material for the printing industry. Roberto Talon, CEO of the GOR Factory and its brand ROLY, explains why you should look beyond the price.

GOR Factory works in Spain and across Europe with more than 9,000 customers, all of them professional. GOR Factory is very close to the market and the feelings of printing companies. Day by day we hear from garment decorators across Europe that low grammage and cotton quality of the products that they decorate, is affecting them because with such poor quality products they cannot obtain the high quality printing or embroidery that they used to be able to. For these garment decorators the resulting quality of the printed or embroidered garment has been their key success factor. But in today’s market they cannot achieve this former high level of quality because they almost never work with a high quality material.

In Europe, everybody talks about grammage. All the people in the printwear market consider that 130gsm is a cheap T shirt, 150gsm is a standard T shirt, and 180gsm is an expensive and high quality one. But this is not only a question of GSMs. At GOR Factory we like to show the market that there are more things to take into consideration, not only for our customers, but for the end user too. At the end of the day if you are going to place your logo or your brand over a textile product to give to the public, you have to perform a link between your brand identity and where it is placed.

This is not a question of GSMs, because when you by a car, you do not only talk about the tyres and the brakes, there are more things. Tubular or with side seams, single jersey or combed cotton, with or without reinforcement on the collar, with or without reinforcement at shoulders, standard fabric or with a wash of enzymes and silicones, an Oeko-Tex 100 product or not… there are a lot of complementary features, that change the price just some pence, but change more the quality of the garment, the quality of the decoration and the image of the brand for the end user that is going to be placed.

In 2015 Gorfactory, and our brand, ROLY, introduced into the market five different basic T shirts in the range 150-165gsm, and two 180gsm T shirts. When these were introduced to one printer, he asked how could it be possible to create such a big range of basic T shirts. It is very easy to answer; you should work not only with grammage but also with the rest of the features mentioned above. For example to achieve, high quality screen printing you need a high quality T shirt. This T shirt should be without imperfections on the surface, be made with a high quality cotton, and at a good price. Your options should not be limited to a 180gsm T shirt with combed cotton, but a choice of products. Gorfactory offers two products with very competitive prices in 165gsm, with a special treatment for the softness of the garment and the quality of the decoration, which is something that you can’t find anywhere else.

Price rules in a lot of orders, but the quality level that the market requires has to remain, and that makes a company stand out.