Preparing your DTG facility

In this article, Dmitry Sarbaev, managing director of FLUXMALL DTG, provides tips on how you can prepare your direct to garment print facility for production.

While helping customers to start their DTG printing businesses – from small-scale cozy printshops to large-scale DTG print production factories, I’ve been consistently observing people underestimating the value of proper facility planning.

Regardless of the size of your DTG business, you need to consider the following items far before your DTG machine completes its first printing job.

Space

The first question to ask would be: ‘How much space do I really need for my DTG setup?’ Space is a commodity, so you need to make sure you really have enough space for the demands of your business and the perspective of its growth in the next six to 12 months.

The DTG printers available on the market have all sorts of sizes: some of them would be no bigger than a regular office paper printer, others would have a separate stand to accommodate the extended width, length and weight. But there are also some printers that have the size and weight similar to a small truck.

The best way to begin planning would be to look into brochures of your equipment – printer, pre-treater and ink curing machine – and note their dimensions and recommended operational space.

Layout

When it comes to drawing your future layout, it could be as simple as using your standard graphic applications to locate equipment boxes on the artboard, or as complicated as preparing CAD drawings for the masterplan of your future facility and all its engineering systems.

No matter how much time you spend on it, your efforts for the layout arrangement should be directed to visualise the proper workflow.

Products like blank garments, cut panels, accessories come in, you convert them into other products – decorated items – and send them out. For this purpose, you might want to plan a linear (in: one door, out: another door on the opposite side), circular (in and out: same door), or U-shape (side-by-side, or other side of the building doors) layouts depending on your needs.

Location

Do keep in mind both the geographical location of where you are based, and the physical location of your print production inside the building.

You might be located in the temperate climate with warm, humid summers, and mild but dry winters. Or, similar to my company located in southern Vietnam, your climate could be endless summer of 30˚C average during the year, with two distinctive seasons: dry and wet. Depending on your location, the focus to maintain the proper microclimate inside your facility could vary, and be at different cost.

As it relates to your location in the building – always mind the size and the weight of your equipment as you move in and out. For large-scale DTG business it is hard to imagine any other option than a ground floor-based industrial facility with dock levelers and/or forklifts for heavy machinery. For printshops – you might want to measure the width of your doors, your elevator and the stairs.

In certain scenarios, you might even need to use the windows in order to bring the equipment in.

Environment

Ensuring a proper microclimate (i.e. stable values of environmental variables like temperature and humidity) in the operating zone of your DTG printer plays a key role in a good performance of your printer.

The temperature and humidity must be maintained at certain levels often 24/7 to provide a steady ink flow and avoid print production disruptions like printhead clogging. Your steps to achieve it will vary in different climates, as mentioned before, but also will be defined by the constriction of the building itself – whether it’s the top-class climate-controlled megamall that you are based in, or you moving into an empty facility with no roof insulation.

Be aware that most air conditioners significantly dry the air. The range of humidifiers that you would install in your production space might also verify from simple home appliances, to nebuliser-based devices, to more complex humidification systems using non-condensing types of spraying nozzles.

Floor marking

Finally, for any size of mid- to large-scale productions it is always handy to do floor markings with chalk or floor marking tapes. This will help you to visualise the workflow and bypass possible bottlenecks even prior to purchasing specific equipment.

Preparing your DTG facility and fulfilling DTG-specific requirements is a necessary step to take as you plan to open or scale up your DTG business. Don’t neglect its importance, and you will eventually benefit in a long-term perspective from the time you spent by having a stable, controllable, and convenient operation of your equipment.