If you are in the garment decoration business, you may be familiar with dye-sublimation. But perhaps sublimation is not currently part of your portfolio. Whether you are presently making customized products with vinyl, transfer paper, screen printing, direct-to-garment (or all of the above), let’s talk about the multiple reasons why you should consider adding sublimation to your offering.
First and foremost, adding sublimation means more money in your pocket. This is because sublimation can fill potential gaps in your offering and result in turning down fewer customers. For instance, if you own a vinyl business, you may be familiar with customers wanting an exact color for a business logo. With vinyl, you can get close to the color, but you typically cannot get the exact color your customer demands. Often, this forces you to turn down business. Sublimation, however, affords the ability to get those accurate colors. As another example, you may have a customer who wants an all-over print for sports apparel. This type of decoration is only possible with dye-sublimation printing.
Sublimation also expands your portfolio beyond garments and into a vast, new world of hard- and soft-surface substrates. Dye-sublimation can be used to print on items such as mugs, keychains, mousepads, ornaments, and thousands of other products. You can leverage this capability to not only offer more types of products but to also create themed bundles of products (think bachelorette parties with matching shirts, flip-flops, shot glasses, etc.), which will help increase your revenue.
Other reasons for adding dye-sublimation include no hand/feel, high durability, and no weeding. Because dye-sublimation ink transfers and binds directly into the polyester fabric or coating, it produces no hand. This leaves something to be desired by your customers, as other garment decoration methods can yield a fairly heavy hand. This also yields high durability with many sublimation transfers lasting as long as the product itself. For your customers that want products they can treasure for many years and wash cycles, sublimation may be what you recommend. Lastly, due to the nature of sublimation, it requires no weeding. This can significantly decrease your turnaround time if customers are looking for something to be produced quickly.
While dye-sublimation has many advantages, there are areas where other decoration methods are better (think cotton and dark garments). This is why it’s essential to provide your customers with a diverse offering of garment production methods, so you can cover all your bases and ultimately win more of their business!
—Coastal Business Supplies
