Machine: Kornit Storm Hexa II
From Adelco
Paul Godfrey
Director of group sales
Tell us a bit about your business
We are a sustainable and ethical British clothing manufacturer driven by our passion to create dynamic, high quality garments that stand out from the competition. Our entrepreneurial spirit demands that we scrutinise the impact of every gallon of water, gram of ink or dye and kilowatt of energy on the environment. We look to reduce, reuse and recycle wherever possible and invest in innovative solutions to achieve our goals and we only use sustainably grown and ethically harvested cotton and fabrics for our garments from globally certified suppliers.
What DTG printer have you bought, and why?
Due to the success and continued growth of our print-to-order and drop ship services, our business has grown tenfold in just four years. We purchased a Kornit Storm Hexa II from Adelco in September 2016 to replace three custom-built Neoflex DTG printers in order to increase our production capacity. Furthermore, we needed greater machine reliability with round-the-clock support.
As part of our continuing expansion plans we made the decision to relocate all our production from London to our new facilities in Staffordshire and Leicestershire and have invested around a quarter of million pounds into our Staffordshire DTG and fulfilment facility.
What are the main advantages of the Kornit printer?
We chose the Kornit Storm Hexa due to its extremely high quality prints, which are comparable to our screen printed garments; its quick speed of production; and its internal pre-treatment function, which allows a much needed uniform consistency to prints on black and coloured garments. We were also very impressed with the support from both Kornit and Adelco during the purchase, install and aftercare when needed.
Is there anything you’d like to see in an upgrade?
Our operators would love voice recognition software to speed up selecting artwork and we would love a wider choice of ink manufacturers to ensure DTG continues to be a competitive option to screen printing.
What’s it like to use?
Our production team find it a dream to print on and commented that it’s a very easy machine to teach new starters to operate. To get the very best production output from it, simply plan your print schedule to be as efficient as possible.
What sort of work is it used for?
The reason for this purchase was to help increase our output capacity for our print-to-order and drop ship fulfilment services. Therefore, many of our runs are individual prints to facilitate this service. For efficiency, if an order for a particular design is over 100 items, then we screen print it.
Will you be buying another DTG machine?
With our expected growth set to continue, we are looking to purchase our second Kornit Hexa machine in 2018 to continue the expansion of this side of our business.
What would be your advice to others thinking of buying a DTG machine?
Do your research wisely and look for the best DTG printing solution that suits your company’s needs and the needs of your intended customer base. There are many factors to consider, such as what price your customers will retail the garments for, fluctuation in both material and inks costs, and your overheads.
DTG printers are a bit like aircraft in that they are only making money when running to their maximum capacity. Importantly, the less they are used, the greater the chance of them developing a fault through ink or pre-treatment build up and of course any down time will always hurt your bottom line.
So our advice would be to choose wisely, do your research and hire good staff to operate and maintain it.
Our production team find it a dream to print on and commented that it’s a very easy machine to teach new starters to operate
