Unleash Your Imagination
by Randy Anderson, Product Marketing Manager
Mutoh America
“Wrapping” the INSIDE of your car.
There has been so much talk and focus on custom car wraps for the outside of the car, but very little about customizing the interior of the car.
Ok, there has been a little wrapping of individual parts inside the car, and now some ‘hydrographics’, but what seems to be mostly missing are the textile applications for the cars’ interior.
Vehicle Headliners?
One that intrigued me recently is headliners for vehicles.
It started with something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbMVH8mFjRc that I found on youtube.
When I got to Pinterest it gave me more of an idea of just how common this might be and how it could be a solution for damaged or loose headliners.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/308567011940623906/
The sad part of this is that I don’t recall ever seeing custom headliners for custom wrapped cars when I had mine wrapped.
It would have been nice to put in a custom themed headliner and visors in my Rodeo.
Seems like dye sublimation would be a perfect application for both of those, and the range of fabrics available would make it pretty easy to keep the same texture look and feel with custom imagery.
Dye sublimation would work to do the door panels and maybe some matching mats – http://dyetrans.com/products.php?webmaincat=sub_prods&websubcat=car_mats
I got rid of the Rodeo a couple of years ago before Mutoh released the direct to a textile printer the ValueJet 1938TX.
I am driving a Juke now, with a sunroof, so there isn’t much of a headliner there, but it sure would be nice to wrap the Juke and create custom seat covers with the TX with visors to match….
But that would be another blog entry for the future……
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Learn more about our full line of textile and dye-sublimation printers.
Read MoreUNDERSTANDING INTERIOR DÉCOR: SOURCES AND INSPIRATION
This is a great blog we thought you might find interetsing. By permission of the author, it is posted here. Be sure to visit the home page of the blog at www.printunlimited.nl
February 9, 2018
Guest blogger – Rachel Nunziata
Even if you haven’t kicked off 2018 by globetrotting to each and every A&D trade show, event and furniture fair, there is enough content circulating throughout social media to get the general consensus; homewares and décor categories are plentiful and growing. Last fall an article written by Ali Morris in CNN Style pointed out fashion labels were strategically teaming up with well-established homeware brands to leverage their labels and create new brands, becoming an instant success after launching. It also stated data from Allied Market Research projects the total expected growth for the luxury niche alone will reach $27 billion by 2020. These collaborations will no doubt continue to multiply as the market grows but truly understanding how design brands think and where new channels will emerge is crucial for the digital print community to convey the value proposition of digital print technology to the creative industry.
(Image courtesy of Print Unlimited,The Netherlands)
The interior décor market is a competitive, crowded space and companies are looking to generate customer loyalty in their product lines and ranges through developing brands aimed at certain aesthetics or demographics. (Not to be confused with interior design, the actual discipline of assembling spaces, interior décor by definition are the objects and materials used to finish spaces.) In the consumer market, this is especially important as transparency and accessibility to online shopping is a sure way to encounter similarities between products after searching pages and pages of popular e-commerce sites. The commercial contract market is also faced with the same quandary. This community remains protective, naturally so, designers and firms rely heavily on sourcing unique products and materials to set themselves apart and woo clients for future projects — but e-commerce is disrupting that.
(Image courtesy of Print Unlimited, The Netherlands)
A common misconception about [interior] designers is most of their revenue is generated through design fees. Normally, trade pricing, which is not privy to the public, is only accessible to licensed design professionals but their clients are now also shopping for products online. The trade cost savings to the designer are not passed onto clients rather the markup is kept by the designer, which in turn incentives them to shop and specify more décor products and materials for the clients’ space. Here is where the majority of the designer’s income is made. Traditional licensing deals(another revenue stream for designers), manufacturing and retailing will also change due to e-commerce.
(Images courtesy of Print Unlimited, The Netherlands)
It’s a paradigm shift that may result in an uptick of higher fees if revenue from trade pricing and markup is watered down for the designer. So where can print service providers and manufacturers with in-house digital printing help those sway clients from shopping online? By collaborating within our industry and offering solution tools forcustomization. Specifying custom furniture, for example, is usually not available to consumers and custom products(mostly furnishings and softgoods) help designers incur additional revenue on a project. Customization in the tradition channel is very costly with long lead times, however, digitally printed wallcovering and textile applications, for example, are opening new pathways for both consumer and contract markets. Some say finished goods within these two segments are actually interchangeable.
(Image courtesy of Print Unlimited, The Netherlands)
Be on the lookout for new opportunities as consumers and design professionals shop online to source homewares and décor products; or launch capsule collections and new brands. New e-design services and third party marketplaces are also reshaping the market with design services available through software by tech startups. (Check out Laurel & Wolf, Havenly or Hutch.com.) These business models give access for anyone, of any budget, to access décor and design services and is a roundabout way as a vendor to potentially list your décor products, too.
If you have questions or comments contact Rachel via email at rachelnunziata@gmail.com or follow her LinkedIn page for daily interior décor and digital print industry updates.
Join us for more discussion around Interior decor at PURE Digital 17-19th April 2019 – www.puredigitalshow.com
The rise of fabric is spurring growth in the soft signage market.
THE ULTIMATE SOFT SELL
How the rise of fabric is spurring growth in the soft signage market.
By Joe Holt
FEBRUARY 6, 2018
Soft Signage
It’s a chilly January evening in Las Vegas, 8 p.m. You’re a thousand miles from home, setting up your tradeshow booth on the floor of a convention center. Your flight got in later than expected, but with the exhibition floor opening at 10 a.m. tomorrow morning, you’ve got all the time in the world to set up. You carefully reach into the heavy crate the event staff brought up earlier today and lift out one of your rigid substrates, only to realize the unthinkable has happened – all four corners of the 1/4-in. PVC board are broken, and there’s no way you can get a replacement here in time.
Disheartened, you glance across the aisle to see one of your fellow plane passengers inserting a final Silicone Edge Graphic, or SEG, into their own booth’s backdrop. The thin silicone strip on the back of the dye-sublimated fabric slips smoothly and easily into the recessed groove of the metal frame, pulling the material taut and displaying their company’s branding with an impressive vibrancy and brilliance.
In that moment you realize two things: One, if you ever bring rigid materials to another tradeshow, you’ll double – no, triple-check – that they’re packed safely; and two, you’ll never bring rigid materials to another tradeshow.
In 2015, an SGIA Journal author estimated 1 billion square meters of textiles would be printed that year, with a 30% annual growth forecast through 2019 (see “The Evolving Soft Signage Market: Part 1,” November/December ). From retailers to event organizers, corporate rebrands to pop-up shops, it’s clear that as consumer demand rises and the cost of dye-sublimation printers, inks and materials continues to drop, soft signage is making a big dent in the industry.
A SOFT SPOT FOR ANY INDUSTRY
With production facilities in Minnesota and North Carolina, Imagine! Print Solutions is a 30-year-old graphic communications company with more than 1,600 employees. It’s also the parent company of Imagine! Express, a Minneapolis-based print shop with an 80,000-sq.-ft. facility specializing in commercial printing, direct mail and high quality fabric prints.
“Soft signage isn’t the largest portion of our product mix,” said Keri Sanders, director of customer experience, “but it’s definitely our fasting growing segment.” The shop’s EFI VUTEk FabriVU 340 and EFI Reggiani PRO 340 produce a wide mix of content for tradeshow graphics, corporate décor, museums and the hot trend taking over the retail world: 24- to 48-hour pop-up shops, restaurants and event spaces.
Gone are the days of a single rigid backdrop for exhibitions and tradeshows, Sanders said. “We’re seeing more and more requests for creative booth builds, featuring one-of-a-kind structures.” With the popularity of silicone-edge graphics frames and other tension systems, clients are looking for new and interesting ways to set themselves apart on crowded show floors, an area where fabric – with its ability to create easy-to-install, eye-catching spaces – is a perfect fit. “We once used fabric to build an indoor barn for an equine nutrition-related client,” Sanders said. “No one had seen that before.”
Corporations and museums are also putting fabrics to use, whether to delineate space from one department to the next or to rebrand and refocus their mission and culture. With textiles, Imagine! can incorporate blockout backing to divide a room, or leave the natural fabric back as-is to allow for a more translucent effect, giving clients flexibility in the look and feel of their office space. In the tech space, Sanders said, Imagine! sees institutional companies competing with Silicon Valley tech giants, updating their offices or dressing up campuses to better recruit millennials.
The most interesting growth industry, Sanders noted, surrounds pop-up shops for retail and events. This type of “here today, gone tomorrow” setup, often featuring a variety of lifestyle graphics and product mixes, can take place in any space, from an existing store that gets rebranded to an unused warehouse that’s transformed overnight into a pop-up shop. “With fabric,” Sanders said, “everything goes up and comes down quickly. It’s almost like you were never there” – except for the lasting impressions left on those who were lucky enough to be present.
THINKING SMALLER, SOFTER
After nearly 60 years in business, BPGraphics ’ team in Phoenix is well-known for their craftsmanship, expertise and exceptional work in large-, wide- and grand-format printing. Operating from its 66,000-sq.-ft.-plus production facility, the company offers a complete line of screen and digital printing and finishing in-house, according to Nicholas Spade, director of marketing.
“Much of our work is still in OOH [out-of-home], such as building wraps, train wraps, billboards,” said Spade. “But smaller scale, soft-signage sales like fabrics, hanging banners, step-and-repeats and store windows continue to grow from one year to the next.”
Many airports, Spade continued, are replacing backlits with fabrics because they’re easier to change out and have sound-dampening properties in high-trafficked areas. Companies exhibiting at conferences and tradeshows, he added, are looking for more cost-effective, travel-friendly solutions, and seem to be moving from full booths to expandable three-wall setups that can fit in a travel bag.
One of the biggest advantages in the “shift to soft?” Shipping. “As transportation prices increase and it becomes more expensive to send giant crates with rigid signs across the country,” Spade said, “the allure of folding up an 8 x 12-ft. piece of fabric, throwing it in a small box and shipping it overnight for a fraction of the cost not only saves money, but makes rushes easier, too.”
And rush they can. On the shop’s PrinterEvolution Evo33 DS, a water-based dye-sublimation press, BPGraphics can produce up to 1,300 sq. ft. of graphics at 126-in.-wide per hour. The prints are then transferred onto a wide variety of fabrics using 400° of heat and extreme pressure from their Monti Antonio 901 Heat Calender.
The specialized equipment that creates fabric’s beautiful, bold textures and colors is more challenging to run than a traditional “ink on substrate” press. “Dye-sublimation requires an entire second step – sublimating the inks (dyes) into the fabric through a heat calender,” said Spade. During this process, you have to consider that each fabric type responds differently to the required heat and pressure, and different-size graphics require different settings. A skilled operator is as much craftsman as technician.
Other issues crop up with fabrics that don’t typically occur with rigid substrates, as BPGraphics learned when they had to create 800 Super Mario-themed bollard covers for the release of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for Target. For instance, how do you keep a material that’s designed to stretch from doing exactly that on a Zund or other digital flatbed cutter? “When exact cuts are required, then precise sewing, it takes time and patience from all parties involved,” Spade said. The result of that trial and error? A successful and popular campaign that garnered national attention.
A SOFT TOUCH AND A KEEN EYE
“There’s just something about fabric,” said Bill Stender, owner of SF Landmark in San Francisco. “Color has been my thing for 30 years, and dye-sublimation offers the most compelling color I’ve ever seen.” Serving Hollywood film studios and Bay-area businesses since 1982, SF Landmark offers everything from large-format digital printing and grand-format dye-sublimated fabric, to dimensional signage and major motion picture props.
With its close proximity to the Moscone Center, the largest convention and exhibition complex in San Francisco, SF Landmark sees no shortage of tradeshow business. “There are shows going on every week or weekend, all year long,” said Stender. And while rigid UV, roll-to-roll printing and dimensional signs have been lucrative in the past, fabrics and textiles have been steadily picking up steam over the last decade or so. Stender thinks he knows why: “Fabric has a particular sheen that can’t be achieved with other substrates. It’s softer, elegant, inviting. Clients love that you can get up close to it, touch it.”
On the shop’s EFI VUTEk FabriVU 340, 15-ft.-wide Klieverik heat press calendar and Matic sewing system, Stender and his team recently produced a series of near-seamless, 20-ft.-wide by 12-ft.-high backdrops for a local photographer, who Stender believes is among his most demanding clientele, as photographers “have an eye for color – it absolutely has to be right.” The result? A glowing endorsement: “The client said all he had to do was shine a light on the fabric and shoot. There weren’t any lighting issues like there usually are with rigid, digitally printed backgrounds.”
Still, if you’re thinking about getting your shop into fabric, Stender cautioned that it’s not for the faint of heart. “There’s a steep learning curve involved. It’s a whole different animal than we’re used to with digital.” The different fabric materials, he noted, all appear relatively the same in their respective ordering books; however, they all possess varying thicknesses (which affects the transfer process), white points, stretch factors, weaves and more. “These are things you don’t really have to worry about with digital printing on rigid substrates.”
In the end though, Stender insisted, “There’s nothing in digital printing that compares to the stunning color and rich quality you can achieve with fabrics.”