If you’ve taken a look at our apparel catalog, one of the first things you’ll notice is the no minimum label attached to certain products and how we have each product’s available colors separated by print method. These important distinctions are there to clearly show which custom apparel options require a 12-piece minimum and which don’t so that you can start your own design taking into account how many you’re looking to order.
We’re always striving to curate the best apparel catalog, but there are a few good reasons why not everything you see in catalog can be digitally printed. If you’re looking to satisfy your curiosity, we elaborated a bit on the topic in our recent video comparing screen printing and digital printing, so check out the clip below that even includes some extra info not seen in the original.
Apparel options by print method
Screen printing is going to have a much wider variety of options when it comes to the type of apparel and the different apparel colors that you can print on. That’s because screen printing works on any fabric type. Including 100% polyester, performance fabrics, and a lot of other synthetic blends.
Digital printing on the other hand is best for 100% cotton and other cotton blends. So, we only offer it on products and colors that we’ve tested and we can guarantee print quality.
But why?
There’s a couple reasons why digital printing is generally limited to cotton and cotton-blend fabrics.
- Problem #1 – Dye-migration : When you heat polyester fiber up to a certain temperature, the dye that’s used to color that fabric gets released up into the printed ink. That will discolor your design and just doesn’t look very good.
- Problem #2 – Wash fastness : The chemistry used in digital printing doesn’t always fix well to synthetic fibers. So we make it a point to test every product to guarantee wash fastness (how durable the print is).
Then what’s different about screen printing?
Screen printing just has a lot more tools to deal with problems like dye-migration and synthetic fibers. And we use those tools to adapt to different scenarios, allowing us to offer a much wider variety of colors and fabrics that you can screen print on.
Let filters help you
You can always sort our catalog by products with no minimum and still see tons of styles and colors that are available for digital printing. We’ve made sure that we offer plenty of comparable styles for both print methods and available colors are always separated between the two so it’s clear which ones have a 12 piece minimum and which don’t.
If you’re still having trouble deciding which is the right apparel option for you, definitely check out our help center and always feel free to contact us and we’d be more than happy to walk you through the process.