IS DECORATOR PROFILE www.images-magazine.com 34 images APRIL 2022 Completing the new arrivals is a Stahls’ Hotronix heat press and a Chiossi e Cavazzuti conveyor dryer which cures printed garments in three-and-a-half minutes at 165°C, with a return belt to bring them back to the start. So far, Fashion UK has been printing runs of up to 200 through DTG, with the rest screen printed. “DTG has been used for print on demand and ecommerce, but the industrial machines are getting a bit faster and a little bit cheaper on the ink,” Steve adds. “But screen print isn’t in danger yet of being out of date because it’s always going to be quicker once you’ve set up. But if you have a 12-colour photographic image and you have to make 12 screens and line them all up, that’s going to take hours before you’re ready to run.” Smaller runs The ability to print smaller high-quality runs on DTG is opening up more opportunities for the licensed apparel market, especially for print on demand, Nic points out. “We have always done UK manufacturing as little and often. The designs are moving at such a rate of knots that you don’t want to be waiting six months for it to come through from offshore as that licence could have gone off the boil by the time it gets here. Our customers are very reactive. Digital takes that up another notch as we can offer exclusives because we don’t have to print so many. Everyone wants exclusives these days to compete online.” Fashion UK’s designers are constantly following trends in licences, including The quality is so good in digital now feedback from the sales team, trying to identify the next big characters. “A retailer won’t take a punt on a secondary character and order 20,000 T-shirts and then find out that they’ve not become famous after all, whereas with digital printing, you can do a few and see if anyone is interested.” With on-demand printing forecast to continue growing, Fashion UK expects to build on its new DTG set-up. “We’re dipping our toe in with these first two machines but the demand is already going strong,” Nic says. “The quality is so good on digital now. It’s more expensive for the inks to print on DTG machines, but that’s balanced against taking huge amounts of stock and not selling it. A lot of people believe that a little and often is better than taking a punt on a few thousand which then don’t sell. It also fits in with the green agenda as you have less waste.” Nic is working to integrate DTG into Fashion UK’s infrastructure as part of wider changes. Pick and pack was brought in-house last year, supported by a new Thermotron automatic folding and packing machine, located next to the labelling and stitching team. With blank garments coming from Fruit of the Loom and Gildan, Nic is also putting in place a programme to have more blanks kept on site. “If you are going to do print on demand, you want to be able to do it instantly, so you need to be able to lay your hands on any of the sizes you sell every day. What matters to our customers is consistency and they get that with standard items from Fruit of the Loom and Gildan. Most of the people who buy what we do are not buying so much the garment, but what’s on the front of it.” Like other UK decorators, Fashion UK has faced challenges over the past two years. It benefited from the shift of fashion retail online during Covid lockdowns but, as a panEuropean business, Brexit has forced it to move more manufacturing to a facility in Poland. “Before the tariffs kicked in, it was just about lead time, getting stuff over to mainland Europe in two to three days, but now it’s two to three weeks with tariffs,” Nic explains. “It’s a shame as we could be using the DTG machines for mainland Europe. In some respects, we have benefited from gaining some UK customers who can’t buy from mainland Europe so the pain hasn’t been as great it could have been.” Rising prices and costs such as fuel are a concern, but Nic says the foundation has now been laid for expanding the DTG operation. “Our task was to set up something that functions at this level so, if we want to build on it, it’s a simple thing if we have the systems in place and it’s running as efficiently as possible. We have something solid to build on.” www.fashions-uk.com The showroom at Fashion UK and Heroes Inc in Leicester The strapline says it all!
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