ImagesMagUK_September_2021

70 images SEPTEMBER 2021 www.images-magazine.com BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT KB H ave you ever tried cooking with new ingredients? You know, the recipe calls for a list of items in exact measurements, but you can’t resist the urge to throw in some honey and cayenne pepper? This is how chefs and home cooks all over the globe turn a standard dish into something spectacular and their own. It’s also how chefs and home cooks the world over ruin dinner in about two seconds flat. To get to the victory circle, sometimes you have to be willing to ruin dinner. Or at least practise enough that you have a good chance to change something without ruining it, but still making it your own. For starters Let’s begin by unpacking the ‘why you should even try this’. In our industry, what makes a decorated apparel shop unique? How are you standing out from the crowd? Screen printing a shirt isn’t that difficult. Neither is embroidering a logo on a polo or digitally printing a T-shirt for an online store purchase. The quickest way to stay a commodity is to be like everyone else. When your recipe tastes like everyone else’s, nobody will line up around the block to work with you. The chef Alain Ducasse has 17 Michelin stars and owns 34 restaurants across the globe. At Alain Ducasse at The Dorchester in London, the seven-course tasting experience for two people will set you back £340. My guess is that it is fantastic. But it isn’t for everyone. Alain spends his time creating out-of-this-world cuisine for people with a taste for French food and who can afford to dine at his restaurants. He has spent a lifetime creating an experience and food that is different from everyone else and, like cream, this has seen him rise to the top in his industry. That is how he is commanding £340 for a dinner. He understands his audience and target market. If you look behind the scenes I’ll bet you can find an incredible support team, the best equipment, and the freedom and time to experiment on new ideas to bring to market. He knows his ‘why’ and how it aligns with his customers best. What is your ‘why’? How are you different from anyone else that decorates a shirt? What ingredients do you cook with? Are you adding honey and cayenne pepper to something? The ingredient list For our industry, if we want to be cooking with new ingredients we should spend a few moments outlining what that means. What ingredients go into your ‘cooking’? For us, we aren’t using tarragon, capers or garlic. It’s the inks, emulsion, squeegees, special effects, thread, and other assorted consumables that add up to success. The garments that we decorate also play an important role – after all, you aren’t printing or embroidering air. Does a professional chef source the cheapest deal they can find? Or do you think they are highly selective about what they allow in the kitchen? They have to make money too. Everything they buy has to be transformed into the product that they gently place on a white-linen-draped table. It isn’t the cost of the ingredients that you should be concerned about, but the performance. Often, better choices cost more. How are you evaluating the ingredients in your shop? Do you even think about it? When was the last time you tried something new just to see how the results might turn out? Your cooking team In Alain Ducasse’s restaurants, he isn’t the one doing the actual cooking every day. His role is to make sure that the supporting team members handle their roles to perfection. He might choose the best ingredients, but if they aren’t chopped right, cooked at an exact temperature, or assembled together in the precise measurements that he builds in the recipe, then the final result won’t match expectations. The same goes for your shop. As my friend Greg Kitson says, “I have news for you kid, you are not in the screen printing business… you are in the screen MAKING business.” This is true. It also carries over to embroidery, digital printing, laser-etching, sublimation, and any other process you use in your shop. The mechanics of how you use those ingredients to build the final result for each order you produce always matter. Example: Double-stroking the underbase Unless you are printing with water- based inks, you shouldn’t have to double-stroke an underbase screen on an automatic press. Yet shops do this all the time because they desire better opacity for that foundational screen. It is, however, just a Band-Aid for poor press management and screen building. Every time you double-hit that screen, you use twice as much ink and twice as much time. What do you think the annual cost of that might be? How much more flash dwell time is needed to gel that thicker deposit before the shirt can move to the next colour? What if you choose to make better screens instead? This is akin to using fresher ingredients in a favourite recipe. What a world of difference it will make. This is a function of the line chefs in your shop’s screen room. Better tension, better emulsion coating, better exposure, and better wash-out can all have a transformational effect of getting to a one-hit underbase. This will allow you to print faster, have less flash dwell time, and a softer hand print. This starts with you questioning and digging into what you need to change. Example: Threadbreaks Just like with screen printing, there is a common problem found with embroidery shops that can be their Achilles’ heel: the dreaded threadbreak. In your shop, how are you controlling this? Is it in an ingredient element, such as using better thread, the right needle, or bobbin tension? Perhaps there’s a problem in the set-up of your machine, or it could just be down to how the design is digitised. It is important that your embroidery crews know how to troubleshoot these challenges and make adjustments for different designs and substrates. Your cooking team in embroidery needs to be trained on how to adjust the different elements to produce the best results. Just as you can’t cook all types of dishes the same way, you can’t embroider every job and design the same way either. It isn’t the cost of the ingredients that you should be concerned about, but the performance. Often, better choices cost more.