til the garment is printed and ready to send to the customer. As for what led me to Scalable Press, I joined the company a little over four years ago. At the time, I had just transitioned from being an intelligence analyst for the Army and was going to school on the GI Bill and running my mom’s restaurant franchise. A regular customer of one of the restaurants who headed maintenance at Scalable Press told me about an opening. I was just finishing school and looking for a new opportunity, so I went for it. Since then, I have served as a supervisor, a facility lead, and now a DTG process manager, learning everything I can to create a standardized, repeatable process to ensure high quality results.
What goes into the DTG process to make a garment print-ready? Before any garment heads to the printer, it has to go through pretreatment and curing. Pretreat is a solution that acts like a primer. Essentially, it prevents the DTG ink from soaking into the garment during printing by filling the space in between the weaving of the shirt fibers. It also allows for white ink to adhere to and sit on top of the surface of the shirt. Without pretreating, the garment will not have the vibrancy you want, so it’s essential to the process.
What’s a good design for DTG? It all depends on the way the artwork is prepared. Designs with transparencies are fun. We don’t always enjoy when the design is a gradient to a transparent because it means we have to reproduce the under layer for the design to have vibrancy of color.
7. Any updates or adjustments you plan on making to the DTG process at SP in 2020?
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