IS DECORATOR PROFILE www.images-magazine.com 48 images OCTOBER 2026 identifying jobs, separating transfers, quality control, packing and dispatch can still involve a surprising amount of human intervention, says Harry. “You can have a machine producing metres of transfers extremely quickly, but somebody still has to turn that continuous production into individual customer orders.” This, he says, is one of the main reasons why they have recently invested in a DTF carousel system supplied by Resolute. “As DTF machines have become faster, the challenge has increasingly moved away from simply printing the transfers and towards what happens afterwards, including handling, organising, finishing and preparing work efficiently at volume. “That is why automation is such an important development for us. It allows the printing process to become much more streamlined and scalable, while also helping improve consistency and reduce the amount of repetitive manual work involved.” “Ultimately, I think the future is a workflow where an order can move from the website into artwork processing, nesting, printing, identification and finishing with very little manual intervention.” UVDTF UV DTF – where transfers are created using UV ink – continues its steady rise, opening up the potential to easily decorate a wide number of products that previously were not particularly convenient to personalise. “Bottles, tumblers, packaging, signage, promotional products, plastics and other rigid objects can all be decorated without putting the object through a printer,” Harry explains. “One of the interesting things we are seeing is customers wanting the same branding across clothing, packaging and promotional products, so they may buy textile DTF and UV DTF from the same supplier. “That is where I think UV DTF has really lived up to the hype. It is not necessarily about replacing an existing process, but making short run personalisation across a much wider range of products much easier.” Powderless potential One development Harry is watching closely is powderless DTF. “The attraction is obvious. Powder is messy, it adds another variable to production and it requires application, recovery, extraction and curing. “Removing that stage potentially makes DTF much cleaner and easier to automate. “Resolute has already been developing powderless technology, which makes it particularly interesting for us because we already work with them for our machinery and technical support. “That said, for a high-volume transfer producer, reliability matters more than novelty. “Conventional powder DTF is now extremely well understood. We know how it behaves, we know its durability and we know how to run it at scale.” Powderless needs to prove that it can deliver the same wash-resistance, consistency, production speed and economics in a high-volume environment, he notes. “If it does that, I think adoption could happen very quickly.” Consistency at scale Colour management remains one of the biggest issues, Harry states. “Customers increasingly expect what they see on screen to be exactly what comes off a printer, but DTF is still a printed process and artwork colour space, RIP profiles, ink sets, film, white ink density and the garment underneath can all influence the final result.” Another challenge, he adds, is that DTF is extremely accessible – it’s also one of its strengths, but it can create the impression that every DTF transfer is the same, whereas in reality, ink, film, powder, curing, machine maintenance and production conditions all make a difference to the final result. “Most of these issues can be addressed through better colour management, controlled production, good quality consumables, regular machine maintenance and educating customers about supplying suitable artwork,” he says. As a supplier of a DTF transfer service, however, an additional challenge – and probably the biggest one – is consistency at scale. “Producing a great metre of DTF is one thing. Producing thousands of metres while keeping colour, adhesion, curing and quality consistent is completely different. As we have grown, we have had to become much more process-driven. That includes machine maintenance, testing ink and media combinations, colour management, environmental control, quality checks and making sure production settings remain consistent across different machines. “We have also learned that changing one component can have unintended effects elsewhere in the process. An ink change, for example, may affect colour output and require profiling or production adjustments before TPU patches come in a range of options including raised, clear and metallic Identity has recently invested in a carousel heat transfer press system DTF is now a mainstream technology, says Harry
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