Quite possibly there has already been talk of this for March but just wanted to know whos attending, and for what reasons.
I went last year and wasnt overly impressed with their screen printing sections. Only M&R were there, thats it. The rest was embroidery it appeared. Fortunately im going for that very reason this year so fingers crossed it will hit the spot so to speak.
As a matter of interest are their many UK screenprinters on this network?
We supply prepress but won't be exhibiting, the costs are ridiculous and I've got better things to be doing than spending four days on a stand. Everyone checks prices on Google anyway.
Not having an indepth knowledge of direct to garment I couldnt tell you for sure, however I do know this is the sector of the print market which is largely focussed upon at this event so chances are you might well be in luck. I would be inclined to get a demo from the manufacturer or supplier seperately if you want to invest that kind of capital.
If you go not the printware and promotions website (google it) you can sign up for free entry in advance and find out about the companies who are exhibiting this year.
Hi all,
well my first show. Not particularly huge, plenty of garment people there. It was nice to see the DTG's up close but having seen them i still can't see why they are so expensive. The parts can't cost more that a grand?
My impression from the show was that times are hard and there are some bargains to be got, which is good for us i suppose.
what did anyone else think of it??
It was a lot smaller than last year. Last year was a lot smaller than the year before.
I found some interesting information there, one company from Sweden were offering some very nice laser cut woven 'badges/labels'. The badges had a heat press backing and can be pressed onto garments. The great thing about these is they can offer a much higher resolution image than embroidery can offer and their minimum order quantities are low yet they still look great. In the past I have seen minimum quantities of 1000 for any woven item at a reasonable per item cost. This is now an option for us to sell high resolution crest style logo's like for example the Army, we occasionally do jobs for people wanting regimental insignia which can have some very high detail and they always want them as small as possible which makes embroidery much harder if not impossible at small sizes on polo shirt fabric.
There were some screen print suppliers there and I took a look at a vacuum exposure unit and one of them had a t-shirt folding machine, I don't know how much it cost but it was quite big considering what it actually does, it did work well though.
There were also some transfer printers there which is always interesting as we are starting to do more screen printing these days and I'm interested in transfers for stock designs. Some of the transfer samples I picked up had text which was barely 2mm high, they were screen printed with an adhesive powder, no doubt through at least a 90T mesh. I've been experimenting with this kind of transfer myself recently and have just ordered some adhesive powder from Colenso to run some tests.
Printware & Promotions Bir' NEC? 
