ImagesMagUK_April_2021

www.images-magazine.com APRIL 2021 images 67 KB BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT H yper-personalisation. What the heck is that? As apparel decorators, you are used to decorating shirts with quantity. That’s the established norm. Shops everywhere shy away from doing anything that doesn’t ‘feed the beast’ and keep those presses humming! But something interesting is happening with the notion of marrying technology and our industry that may just have some profitable legs. Here’s something I want you to consider. Today is the slowest day for the world for technological change. Smart people everywhere are inventing new ways of working, printing, communicating, and processing information. Tomorrow will be faster than today. The next day will have better tools for us to use. In this article, I’ll be connecting some things that I see today with some possibilities for the future. Will I get it right? Who the heck knows? But I’m willing to think about it and write down some thoughts. What is hyper-personalisation? Simple. This is a personalising the garment to a unique individual. Very small decoration runs. Usually just one piece, but the print edition can be more if there is a unique something about it that is made to be for someone with a specific change to the garment. Hyper-personalisation: The present Our industry personalises garments in a multitude of ways. We heat-press names on the back of football shirts or embroider ‘Larry’ on the right chest of some mechanic’s work shirt. Those standards have been around for a long time. You may even produce those types of orders in your shop. These are personalised and decorated garments intended for one person. Eleven-year old Mary on the football team, or Larry who is going to fix your brakes. But you can also send in a picture of your dog or cat and this can be reprinted on a custom pair of socks or reimagined as a renaissance noble in a fake oil painting. Our industry is also moving very quickly into the print-on-demand space to support the online stores’ gold rush. Previously, retail would print thousands of garments and hold them in a warehouse for distribution. Now, all of that is outsourced and the shirt is printed on the day or just after the order is placed by a third party vendor. Everything is moving to the sales unit of one. Companies like Inkthreadable and Teemill are springing up to help people with their online stores. Hyper-personalisation: The future There are few things that I think are going to start creeping into our industry and it is going to be exciting to see. The technology either exists right now or is being developed to make these possibilities a reality. The power of variable data Let’s take the recent Bernie Sanders meme as an example. If you didn’t keep up with this pop culture trend, Senator Bernie Sanders attended US President Joe Biden’s inaugural event dressed in his ‘Vermont best’ and sat patiently waiting for the hoopla to commence. His pose, mask on, legs crossed, huge handmade mittens in the foreground, went viral. As a result, people everywhere jumped on the trend and spliced Bernie into all sorts of crazy photos and events. For example, I made a pic in a few minutes where I layered him into the chest-bursting scene from one of my favourite movies, ‘Alien’. And look above, where Bernie has been added to a screen print shop scene. People understand this idea. Now, imagine that instead of Bernie and the screen printer, the variable data is a high school leaver’s photo that will be inserted into an existing graphic design template. The school leavers shirt gets an update. They all look the same, as it is based on the same master graphic, but it is hyper- personalised to that individual graduating student. For commercial use, this has to be automated to work and mastering the workflow funnel is the tricky part. The final result: An online store sells the shirts, pulls in the data, and pushes it out to be printed at 400+ shirts an hour speed on a school-colour tee. The beauty of this is that the shirt can retail for more money as it has customised value. Hyper-personalisation adds pounds to the sale. Now, imagine that same scenario for fans of a rock band, professional sports teams, fundraising, popular memes just like the one with Bernie Sanders, event swag, a clothing brand, a tourist attraction or a theme park. Hyper-personalisation doesn’t have to be images It could be sponsor logos for an event T-shirt. Imagine there is an event where you gain access to different classes or networking opportunities. At commercial print speeds, the event goer’s shirt is hyper-personalised and printed with a one-off design change that adds their name, company logo and some fun icons that allow them entry into the different segments for the event. They get a branded souvenir and don’t have to wear the clunky name badge with the lanyard. Or maybe the order is for a local 5k run. Usually, everyone gets a commemorative run shirt that they It isn’t the ink on the T-shirt that the consumers are buying. It is hyper- personalisation Bernie Sanders patiently watching a screen printer at work