An innovative new interactive marketing option for event promoters. FreeScreening is live screen printing and its transforming how promotional marketers deliver brand impact to their client’s target market.

Traditionally, custom t-shirts were in the realm of the giveaway, soon to be forgotten by all but the one who signs the printing check. 248creative has flipped the old accepted methods of t-shirt promo on their heads with the advent of inclusive live screen printing. One part manufacturing and one part stage show, freescreening is riding the cusp of interactive guerrilla marketing.

Brand payoffs are huge and the cost is low. We’ve released this video to give an overview of the process.

Click here for a PDF info sheet about FreeScreening or contact us today to book your next event!

248creative is a visual communications company based in Troy, Michigan (Metro Detroit). We handle all aspects of the design and printing of our client’s custom promotional materials. From business cards to postcards and direct mailings to full color tshirts and wall tapestries, we can handle any project.

248creative also provides cutting edge multimedia services including videography, video-for-web and web design & development.

Get return on your investment, contact 248creative today to take control of your business’ image.

248creative specializes in short run garment production. By our definition, a short run is any custom tshirt order of less than a thousand pieces. Not that we don’t handle runs much larger, but we’re sensitive to the fact that not all of our clients are planning to do nationwide promotional distributions. We want to make sure small, local companies and organizations have the benefit of solid full color custom tshirts just like the big players.

That’s why, as the first company to offer non-transfer, full color, direct-to-garment printing in Oakland county, we’ve removed all minimums on full color custom tshirts.

You want one shirt? You got it!

You want 200? You got it!

Our sliding pricing for full color custom tshirts has breaks at 250 and 500 pieces to fit any need or budget. Contact Us to place your order today! Average turnaround is 5 to 10 days, not counting heavy seasons like back to school and christmas.

The impact is tremendous and running garments with full color, photographic quality really amplifies the perceived value of our clients’ businesses and brands. We’ve reached a point in modern printing where flat, single color runs are dated and really devalue a company or brand. As a buying public, we’re used to full color vibrancy in the sea of marketing materials we wade through each day… it’s almost required to present a current image at all. If you aren’t printing your garments in full color, you’re leaving money on the table and not maximizing your ROI.

To make sure all of our clients have access to this high end decoration technique,

Organic Tshirts are a sustainable solution to the ecological problems inherent in conventional cotton production.

Conventionally grown cotton is very pesticide intensive, consuming up to 25% of the world’s pesticides while only taking up 3% of the earth’s farmland. The chemicals used are very toxic, rendering the farmland unusable after several harvests if they are not rotated with alternate crops on a regular basis.

According to HAE NOW:

“A year 2000 USDA study revealed that eighty-four million pounds of pesticides were sprayed on cotton in the U.S.A, ranking it second behind corn. Some of these toxic chemicals include the infamous defoliant Paraquat and insecticides like Parathion which is 60 times more toxic that DDT! In fact, the EPA considers 7 of the top 15 pesticides used on cotton as “likely” or “known” human carcinogens.”

In addition to the environmental benefits of using organic cotton, there are quality implications too. The shirts we chose to use for 248creative.com clients are a very clean knit garment, they are comfortably tapered, and overall a very high quality product. We’re in love with them, they line our own closets.

I’m wearing one now.

We constantly get customers that are trying to get their projects to stand out. A lot of times they’ll be attempting to model a style they’ve seen in a boutique or specialty store, but they don’t know what process to ask for to get the effects they seek. Dye sublimation is such a process.

For the record, dye sublimation can be used on many substrates, from photo paper to ceramic tiles. This post focuses specifically on dye sublimation as a garment decoration technique.

While avoiding the superdork explanation of the chemical process involved in dye sublimation, I’ll sum it up.

1. Print dye on special paper from a modified printer or on an offset machine.
2. Press onto a light-colored polyester shirt with a heat press
3. dye turns to gas and dyes the plastic polymers in the polyester shirt

Dye sublimation is permanent and will not crack like plastisol inks (conventional screen printing inks), which are dense, opaque and sit on top of the tshirt. The dyes used in dye sublimation are reactive and fuse with the fabric, becoming a part of it. This results in a totally smooth “handless” print which is a permanent part of the garment.

One side benefit of the dyes lacking the same density as plastisol, is that you can print over seams in garments. This allows creative designers to make odd placement prints and all-over prints, without ink pooling up undesirably along garment seams. These styles sell ridiculously fast.

Another thing to take into account in that dye sublimation is a FULL COLOR decoration technique. This saves you having to worry about designing for spot color separations and other technical limitations with conventional screen printing.

Garment Requirements

As stated before, dye sublimation works with plastics… which polyester is. Cotton is not, therefore we can’t use dye sublimation techniques on cotton, or any natural fiber garments. There are sprays you can use which mist a fine layer of polymer onto a shirt for the dye to combine with, but they are hit or miss in our experience. Even then, we would only use the prep spray on 50/50 blends so there was some polyester to bond with (we still weren’t thrilled with this). Like I said, we don’t do it anymore, we only use garments that have been designed for sublimation.

For many, this in not a limitation at all though. Polyester has come a long way from 1978 and the new generation of apparel manufacturers that deal in polyester have taken great strides in matching the softness of cotton while adding some pretty sophisticated moisture-wicking features to their tshirts.

Garment color options are more limited with dye sublimation. Because we’re dealing with dye and not ink, there’s no way to sublimate dark garments. You can’t add some blue to a can of black ink and it instantly becomes blue… no, its black. The same principle is in effect here. So far the darkest we’ve been able to get a good result from is about terracotta level. Anything darker and you get considerable muting of the image.

We did come up with the workaround of using white shirts and dye sublimating the whole tshirt to a different color with design in place, and it does work, albeit with minor inconsistencies, but dye sublimation dyes aren’t cheap and this definitely would add to your production cost.

Price

Speaking of cost, what kind of expense should you expect using dye sublimation? There are a couple variables here, namely dye cost, paper cost, and garment cost. The dyes used in this process are definitely more expensive than conventional plastisol (screen printing) inks, about $1000 a set (4 liters of CMYK), but depending on how much coverage you have in your designs you can make that stretch. The paper cost isn’t high, but it is a cost that doesn’t exist in screen printing (unless you’re printing transfers), and must be factored. Garment price is also an issue. At 248creative, we charge $3 for a 100% Cotton Tee. The wicking polyester equivalent would be about $10. So it is a more expense process, but that’s also why it commands a higher price.

We charge between $20 and $35 each for a finished tshirt, depending on how much ink is used ($35 being an all-over print). When you take into account that we are talking about full color printing, dye sublimation is very competitive with its closest quality neighbor, direct-to-garment printing. I’ll post a comparison between the two options in the future.

Summary

Dye sublimation is a hot decoration method that definitely moves off the shelves. For the slightly higher production cost, you can command a much higher price from your retail buyers as well as end users. Consider it!

If you have any questions or would like a quote on a dye sub project,
Contact Us!

We’ve added a new garment option!

Alternative apparel makes the coolest, lightest, softest and most killer shirts around. Their cuts and materials are BETTER than American Apparel, which is a tall order to fill. We’re starting out with a girlie style and a unisex style. They’re well tailored and fitted, we’re sure you’ll dig them.