Grand format dye-sublimation printing is, to me, the most exciting and the sexiest product in our business. To think that I can create a file in Photoshop and a few hours later it is 10' wide and 60' long and on a permanent fabric (and what a choice I have), is so totally sexy I cannot get enough of it. Dye-sub, regardless of the format—small name badges to huge concert and event graphics—is just the most class you can produce in the digital graphics industry.

When finishing sublimated fabrics, you will need a finishing department that can handle a sewing machine. Do not take this lightly. This is the most difficult part of the process.

DYE-SUB BEGINNINGS
Before there was dye-sub fabric, we had no such product we could just sell and not be concerned about something. Take adhesive vinyl: is the graphic going to stick? Will it peal off? Will it come off at the end? Will it not be the right size? Will the installer make a mistake installing it? Blah blah blah. Then we have vinyl banners: I am sorry, but these belong on a pole way far away from us humans. They curl, they look cheap, there is nothing nice or sexy about vinyl banners. Then we had the products like Tyvek, carpet, etc. All have a place, but none of them are sexy and all have some type of drawback.

Now we show our clients dye-sub fabric, and they love it. My first choice was replace all banners with fabric—this was a hit. Next take out the Lexan-coated prints in the roll up-banner stands and put in fabric—and yes, another huge hit. Next let’s take out wrapped walls at shows and replace with fabric—one problem, no machine could print wider than 60" for dye-sub. Then came the 10' wide sublimating heat press. Next we fired up our 10' and 16' 300 dpi printers with dye-sub ink, found a few companies that would make paper for us 10' wide, and we are making the finest prints since the Lambda prints. Then Mimaki comes to market with their new 10' printer designed for hot solvent printing, and we put dye-sub ink in the printer and now they sell more of these printers for dye-sub than solvent ink. With 720 x 720 dpi 126"-wide directly printing to the fabric or to paper for dye-sub, we are making the grand-format world go crazy for fabric. Grand-format dye-sub is so hot, a number of manufactures are trying to come to market with printers that print directly to the fabric and cutout the sublimation process or include a curing process in the printer.

I have more than 50 fabrics to choose from for direct printing, but really only about five of them are the hot sellers— heavy knit, poplin, ultrasheer, flag and satin.

Dye-sub, regardless of the format—small name badges to huge concert and event graphics—is just the most class you can produce in the digital graphics industry.

SOME GOTCHAS
Today more than 40 percent of my business is grand-format dye-sub, and I love it. I have more than 50 fabrics to choose from, but really only about five of them are the hot sellers—heavy knit, poplin, ultrasheer, flag and satin. Now for me to go on and on about how great this is would not be fair because there are a few “gotchas” in this process.

1) The cost of the 10' heat press is about $80,000. The Mimaki 10' printer is about $130,000. Ink, paper and supplies to get started about $10,000. So the layout for the system before print one comes out is $220,000 or $4,500 per month for 60 months.

2) Printing dye-sub is done two ways. To transfer paper or direct to fabric.

• Printing to paper sounds easy, but it is not. The paper is bond and when you have heavy coverage, the paper tends to cockle and makes it difficult to handle.

• If you print directly to the fabric, many of the experts feel you should setup the printer for direct only. This process cuts out the paper, but you should purchase coated fabric because the coated fabric takes the ink better and keeps the dot gain tight. If you think you are saving the $.12 per sq. ft. on the paper, guess what, the coated fabric is more costly than the standard dye-sub fabric. The process requires you to use a Beaver tissue when sublimating the fabric so you do not stain the belt on the heat press.

3) The sublimation process using the paper is more difficult than it looks, and the fabrics can shrink during the process. If the fabric shrinks during the sublimation process you can get “tiger stripping” and other less desirable results that will cause you to have to reprint.

4) Labor. You need more than one person on the heat press because the rolls are heavy, the machine is hot, and you cannot stop the process at any point so you must keep the press running at all times. As a result, two people make the job much easier.

We show our clients dye-sub fabric, and they love it.

FINISHING FOR DYE-SUB
You will need a finishing department that can handle a sewing machine. Do not take this lightly. This is the most difficult part of the process. Have you run a sewing machine? Well if you have stitched banners, try fabric, and you will find it is much more difficult. Plus each fabric is different and you should heat cut the fabric when an edge is not finished. This whole finishing process is time consuming and you need a good staff to do this properly. You must have enough work coming in to have a full time finishing person for just fabric. Plus, because the fabric is so large, you will need a lot of room and you must have a clean area as the fabric picks up dirt, and once it is dirty, you are done.

NOW FOR THE RETURN
Let’s look at the return on investment. First, check out the costs for transfer printing vs. direct printing. Cost models for the return on investment work like so:

1) Print to transfer paper, then sublimate
• Ink is about $200 per liter or $.27 per sq. ft.
• Paper is about $.12 per sq. ft.
• Fabric is around $.30 per sq. ft.
• Total cost per sq. ft. is $.59 or about $5 per linear foot.

2) Print direct to fabric, then sublimate
• My ink here is Dupont instead of Sawgrass, so cost will be a little more, say $.30
• Beaver paper to protect the belt - $.03
• Coated fabric $.55
• Total cost per sq. ft. is $.88

I sell to two segments. When I sell directly to end users, I typically get around $10 to $12 per sq. ft. for finished goods. I sell to the trade for around $5 to $7, depending on the client, job and waste.

I sell to two segments. When I sell directly to end users, I typically get around $10 to $12 per sq. ft. for finished goods. I sell to the trade for around $5 to $7, depending on the client, job and waste. We do not print direct to the fabric because we have found the cost and the quality is not where we need it to be for all materials. By printing to paper, we are able to sublimate to 100% of all the fabrics, but if we direct print then we are limited to a select number of materials. So for us, the return is about $6 on average for a gross profit.

The only bottle-neck is the printer because it runs about four inches a minute, so in one hour we have about 20' done. We tend to sell more 8'-wide prints then 10', so every hour we can expect about $960 gross profit. The system we use is so reliable that we can get 22 hours a day out of it. So, with three shifts we can expect, provided we can sell this much, more than $5.5 million in gross profit per year. Now this is pie in the sky, but it’s not unthinkable to expect more than $1 million per year in gross profit from a grand-format dye-sub system. Now the $230,000 does not look so bad, does it?