ImagesMagUK-July-2020

www.images-magazine.com JULY 2020 images 59 WIDE FORMAT DIGITAL PRINTING Brodelec: Kornit Presto Hugo Willems, operating director Tell us a bit about your business Brodelec has been fashioning, embroidering and printing apparel using different techniques for 43 years. When it became possible to print digitally directly on garments, we immediately made the decision to experience Kornit’s first systems and have never stopped experiencing its improvements and production capacities growth since. What is the latest printer you purchased from Kornit, and when did you buy it? A year ago, we purchased a Kornit Presto S at the Itma show. It’s an all-in-one solution that allows us to print on fabrics that haven’t been pretreated, in any quantity per design, and without water consumption, for approximately €800,000. What other wide format printers, if any, did you look at before purchasing the Presto? We didn’t look at other fabric printers since we previously only decorated made-up blank garments and decided to start printing rolls of fabrics because of Kornit’s range of products widening from direct-to-garment to direct-to- fabric. As a strong partner offering quality and production flexibility, this supplier prompted our jump into fabrics, sewing and tailoring. What do you think are the Presto’s main advantages? Our supplier gave us the opportunity to enter the market directly with the competitive advantage of large capacities, recording a maximum of 500sqm of material pretreated, printed and dried per hour. The ability to work on every white textile avoids owning different devices or machines; it’s also what makes this solution a complete plant-in-one production line. Is there anything you’d like to see in an upgrade or don’t particularly like about it? As most industrial machines require heavy electronic automations, the first units sold sometimes show unexpected behaviours, but fortunately we are aware of this. The support team finds solutions very quickly as soon as we discover any failures or suggest ideas to improve it. It is a collaborative process. What’s it like to use? In terms of productivity and operating costs, it is impossible to compete with alternative printing techniques such as reactive or screen printing for high volume runs. Digital printing, whether it is this model or another one from another machinery producer, is used for the hyper-personalisation of small and medium quantity orders. Alternative patterns, long-distance designs, series of unique designs and, particularly, designs directly printed with cut-contour outlines are types of goods that cannot be offered by the non-digital techniques and it becomes our role to bring to the market new services that, I believe, suit the new needs of production in a value chain asking for local production, low quantities, fast delivery, high personalisation and environmentally responsible production. What type of work is it used for? This printing solution actually rocks for many applications: outdoor decoration, home textile, haute-couture, automotive… We mostly print fabrics to be sewn, and we more specifically currently produce personalised masks. What other types of machines do you use in combination with the Kornit Presto? When we bought the Presto, we had the idea of buying at some point in the future a fabric laser cutter. When we decided to start producing personalised masks, we purchased earlier than expected a laser cutter powered by Summa and produced by CadCam Technology, as well as sewing machines. Without this complete chain of printing, cutting and sewing it would have been very difficult this year for us to sell our printing services, as our clients could not realise their projects without manufacturers being able to make their very low and highly personalised orders after we had printed the fabric. What would be your advice to others thinking of buying a similar printer? Personalisation is the relevance of this technology, this is what decorators should focus on. But this involves a lot of work on the material after printing, so you either need a partner who is able to do this work, or to do the work in-house – this allows you to be more flexible and so is worth it. www.brodelec.fr Hugo Willems, in a personalised mask, with Brodelec’s Kornit Presto