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!