Embroidery and DTG – a perfect match!

Why not combine embroidery with direct to garment printing to increase your product range for being ahead of your competition? Here, Folker Stachetzki, Brother’s marketing manager, explains why this should be the next step for your production.

Direct to garment printers are becoming more and more popular. The reason for this is, that no matter whether they are used in large mass production, in small shops or to create unique personalised prints – thanks to their flexibility and simple, clean operation, they are an efficient addition to any production.

Whichever situation you use your DTG printer; there are tools available in the marketplace that make the combination of embroidery and DTG printing as easy as possible.

These include the following:

• Lowering the printing platen
  The ability to lower the printing plate means textiles of any thickness can be printed in high resolution without touching the print head. Lowering the platen is also important if your finishing is way thicker than the textile.
• Special platens for complicated printing materials

Furthermore, there are special plate sets available to easily print on shoes, caps or scarves etc.
This facilitates the printing of difficult positions or textiles that cannot be printed with a ‘normal plate’ (such as shoes for example).

• Position finder
  Developed especially for direct to garment printing, projector systems and cameras solutions are the key to combining DTG printing with embroidery. Using these systems means you are able to print to with precision on the required position. The projector solution projects an image of the design to be printed on the (already placed) garment. An advantage of this technique is that the operator sees immediately what design is loaded to the machine and where it will be printed. While, the second option means a camera is mounted to the printer, which takes a snapshot of the placed garment and in the included software you can place, scale, rotate and move the design until it´s in the precise position.
• Once you have your projector system or camera in working order, you can load your already embroidered textile on the platen which works best for you. You can then see where the print will be located and also how the design will look like at the end.
• And finally, you can print onto the already embroidered textile!

Having these tools at your disposal means no more misprints on pre-embroidered garments.
This is an easy way to increase your possibilities of finishing an exclusive or even personalized product with additional technology.

You see – combining embroidery with DTG has never been easier – so what are you waiting for?