The following is an excerpted transcript of an interview with Kevin Kelly regarding Blue Heron’s DTG business. The interview will appear in its entirety this fall in seceral international trade magazines.
Q: Please tell us in a few sentences about the nature of your business -- what kinds of things do you do, on what scale, and for what markets?
A: Blue Heron Industries, Inc., is a full service industrial apparel decorating company that produces Screen Printing, Embroidery and Direct-To-Garment printing in house. The company services public customers as well as major entertainment clients. In addition to decorating, the company provides warehousing and tour support for national entertainment productions.
Q: Why did you become interested in Direct-to-Garment printing in the first place?
After years of sitting on the sidelines waiting for DTG technology to develop, I decided it was time to get involved in DTG as an alternative method of decorating about three years ago. In the early 1990’s I realized that just being a screen printer was not enough. The handwriting was already on the wall and when NAFTA was passed I knew the industry would never be quite the same again. At that time I expanded into the embroidery business and became what was known in the industry as a “Hybrid” apparel decorator – a screen printer and an embroiderer. At that time there were only a handful of volume screen printers doing embroidery in house. By 2007 I faced another critical decision - do we get involved in DTG in order to compete at the next level of sales and technology. I intuitively knew that I needed to get into the industrial DTG market despite my aversion to the process as a career screen printer – it seemed less than natural but I did it anyway. That decision has proven to be both timely and lucrative. Today we have moved past the “Hybrid” stage and we consider ourselves to be a unique “Triple Threat” in the industrial apparel decorating market by excelling in the three main disciplines, Screen Printing, Embroidery and Direct-To-Garment printing.
Q: What need were you hoping it could fill in your business or what goals were you hoping it would help you achieve?
A: Quite frankly, we wanted to take advantage of all of the orders that we were seeing that could not be screen printed. As more and more people got their hands on copies of Photoshop or started working in programs that could only render jpeg files, I realized that we were missing the boat on too many orders that we could not output color separations for. So the expansion into the digital custom t-shirt market was done to get those orders. What we didn’t expect to happen was that DTG would become the medium that we would focus on in our art room. One of our major assets is that we can provide comprehensive art services to our big customers in the entertainment field and digital printing has become the preferred decorating method. As of today 90% of the designs we create are for the direct-to-garment printing. The transition from the limited color gamut in screen printing to full color DTG has been incredible. We can proof on the fly, which saves days in some cases. Many of our customers work on a just-in-time inventory basis and the short run capability of DTG has made that easier. They love not having to make higher screen printing minimums. We consider 144 DTG prints short run. Anything less than that we call a “micro run”. Long runs are orders over 500 units.
Q: Why did you choose Kornit D.O.G. printers?
A: We had a short foray into DTG using a brand of printers that utilized a Windows based driver system and it wasn’t for us. It was one of the bigger brands. We found that it was too limiting in terms of our style of art and our need to be able to effect edits accurately thru Photoshop. We needed something that was robust and used a more sophisticated approach to file prep and ripping. We really depend on Photoshop to make all of this work, so the “take it or leave it” result we got from Windows based driver system was not going to cut it. We really weren’t interested in having our print results controlled by Microsoft. Kornit’s ripping software and the machine application software are perfectly integrated and allow us to do what we need to do and what we want to do.
The print head technology is just so different than the rest of the DTG machines out there. One machine carries more dollar value in print heads than other machines cost. There’s something to that.
I did a lot of research on Kornit. If there was a stone to turn over I turned it over. So when our machine finally arrived we had some idea of what to expect. In other words we were beyond the sales pitch! The first time I saw a Kornit printer in person it was operating in a production environment. I was so blown away by the quality of the machines construction and overall functionality that I wrote a check the next day. I knew what the other options were.
Q: Why did you think they would be the best choice for you?
A: I’ve always liked the bigger more industrial machines. I started with a manual t-shirt press, saw an automatic, and bought one! After all of these years in hot, sticky and dusty factories you get a sense for whether or not a machine has the ability to stand up to rigorous daily use just by looking at it. The “fit and finish” on the Kornit is worlds apart from the table top looking machines. I feel that owning a factory full of Kornit machines says you are a serious committed player. The Kornit printing machines are meant to take a pounding 24/7. It’s not the kind of thing you put in your house!
Q: What are the advantages you identified with Kornit printers over the competition?
The obvious reason is the print quality on darks. We specialize in printing on black and we believe we are the best DTG printer in the USA on black custom t-shirts. About 75% - 90% of any given months production is on black. The Kornit Quick P software is awesome. It gives us the ability to adjust our white printers at the machine is while we are printing. We really love the fact that we can change our under-base opacity on the fly during a print run if we need too particularly when we are changing garment colors or brands. It really helps to be able to do the same thing with our highlight whites as well. We have developed some proprietary techniques in this area which we don’t share with anyone outside the company.
The other really obvious reason is Kornit’s patent on wet-on-wet printing. The on board pretreatment is one of Kornit’s overwhelming advantages over the competition. I can’t even imagine the alternative being an option. I’ve heard of people using Wagner spray guns to pre-treat or having to spend thousands of dollars on a separate station to pre-treat offline. The off-line pretreatment option leads to bad prints, wasted productivity and a general disruption of order flow.
The Kornit service and technical departments are beyond attentive. But in the end you really can only be successful if you fully understand the inner workings of your own gear.
Q: Which Kornit printers – and how many of them -- do you have working for you?
A: We use 932’s. We never really discuss the particulars of any our gear. I can say however, that we like the redundancy offered by multiple single pallet machines. It’s a personal choice.
Q: Tell us about the experience you’ve had using Kornit printers. Have they lived up to your expectations?
A: There is a learning curve. I’d say six months gets you the basic operating knowledge you need to run your business properly. After that, experience and commitment to the process is what dictates success or failure. If you a really good screen printer or embroiderer who cares about quality you will probably be a really good DTG printer too. If you’re not committed to excellence you will not achieve excellence.
I’d say the machinery has exceeded our expectations but we have really put in a major effort at becoming the best. We could not get the results we get without Kornit gear.
Q: Tell us about the experience you've had using the Deconetwork solution with your Kornit. What are the benefits of this online solution for your business?
A: I did the same research on Deconetwork as I did on Kornit. I got involved with Deconetwork during much earlier versions of the software and it had some limitations. It was a work in progress that has really fleshed out to be a state of the art solution for online marketing of decorated apparel. The development of the Deconetwork software is fluid so the upgrades and new releases are pretty frequent at this point. I’ve been a beta tester for about a year and a half and I can tell you that they are very interested in getting feedback that pertains to real life issues. Their goal is to be as user friendly for the customer and the subscriber as possible. The product offers really comprehensive front end and back end capabilities. The fulfillment center is the brain of the software that runs your business and it really does an incredible job. We know HTML and CSS programming so like the fact that we can control a lot of features on the front end of the software. The back-end of the software controls the business side of the operation and it actually reduces the number of employees processing orders.
The Kornit and Deconetwork combination is a powerful professional toolkit. Deconetwork is very straightforward and so is Kornit. We can actually get an order out of Deconetwork and print it on our Kornit machines in less than 5 minutes. The customers love the print quality of the Kornit and the automated customer service side of the Deconetwork software. The experience for the customer is perfect! We have plenty of real testimonials to back that up.
Q: In a few words, compare your business before and after putting Kornit on the job. Are you able to do things better or differently than you were before?
A: We are a different company. We have the three major custom t-shirt disciplines of decorating covered under one roof. We are adding customers at a rate that is like nothing we have ever experienced. Our presence is being expanded by word of mouth due to our Kornit DTG printing capabilities.
Q:How is using Kornit effected your overall expenses and your gross margin?
A: We have more money to spend on more machines! It also has helped us thru this economy by generating revenue that we would not have been able to capture before.
07/22/2010
Little Falls, New Jersey 07424
|
