California Apparel News

Three leaders in color technology discuss the latest innovations in creating vivid color quickly and reliably

You know that famous photo of a sailor kissing a girl at the end of World War II? You can make a dress plastered with the perfect reproduction of that image. That is, if you could get the rights to use it.

The ability to print any photographic image on a piece of fabric with stunning resolution is already here, and has opened up a new vista of design possibilities for apparel manufacturers. Technology is not just expanding design horizons, it’s also making things faster and easier, especially when it comes to the often lengthy process of setting color standards.

The California Apparel News spoke with three companies at the forefront of color and digital printing technology: Fabrics 2 Dye 4, Datacolor, and Pantone.

Barbara BurgerPartner in Fabrics 2 Dye 4

CAN: How old is Fabrics 2 Dye 4?

BB: We’ve been around for about two and a half years as an offshoot of what I’ve been doing for 20 years. My partner is the sole proprietor of Brushstroke Design Associates, which is primarily geared toward the apparel and home-furnishings industries. My background is primarily in technology for the apparel industry, for getting images on textiles.

CAN: Tell us what you do.

BB: We do digital printing, which is the way to go for many things. One, it has incredible flexibility. It allows you to print almost anything on almost any [type of fabric] so it increases your ability to design. Traditional designs are very much limited to how much money you’ve got to put down on screens for printing. For a company like Wal-Mart, something that’s printed with ten screens is incredibly expensive by Wal-Mart standards, whereas a company like Hermegrave;s might use 33 screens, which is one of the reasons why their scarves cost so much.

Digital printing says forget the screens. We can give you whatever you want as far as colors, plus photographic images. The problem is it hasn’t been as fast as traditional printing, but that’s changing. Now you have machines that can do 180 yards per hour—that’s starting to get up near screen-printing.

CAN: What does “digital” actually mean, and what does it enable you to do?

BB: It means you can take any electronic file and print it without having to cut a screen. You just take your image and send it straight to print.

But despite all the technology out there, color is still the most difficult issue, because people in the apparel industry are the most difficult about color. When I send a file to print, it’s relatively close, but with the apparel industry, that’s not close enough, so we have to tweak by mixing colors to create a color profile.

CAN: Do you do the printing yourselves?

BB: We have a machine by Mimaki. Our customers are people making samples, and people who need short runs because they’re looking to test the market with something.

CAN: Expensive machine I imagine. $100,000?

BB: A third of that, which is what makes it feasible.

CAN: What is your production capacity?

BB: We can do upwards of 20 yards an hour if need be, but we tend to give up speed for quality. So we run it slower at a higher resolution.

CAN: What is the result of digital printing on the fabric itself? How does it stand up to washing?

BB: We are working with the same dyes used in traditional screen or rotary printing. The quality is in some cases better than with screen-printing. We get a multitude of stories like, “My printer in China told me only yesterday I won’t have anything in time and we’re doing a photo shoot.” We can turn it around in a day or two depending on our workload, and it stands up to washing pretty much the same as screenprinting.

CAN: How can photographs be used in textile design and printing?

BB: What we can do that traditional printing can’t is complex photographic stuff. We had a customer who made a beautiful handbag using a photograph.

CAN: And the use of photos in fashion design is limited only by a designer’s imagination?

BB: Exactly. We’ve done things with postcards from the 1800s. We scan them in—they’re copyright-free.

CAN: What are some of the more interesting projects you’ve worked on?

BB: One fun thing we did was for a designer who went shopping in New England somewhere and found an antique garment, but all there was was the sleeve. The designer loved the pattern and envisioned a whole garment made from it. The sleeve was a light, airy cotton fabric with a very simple print. They said, “We want this to walk down the runway Friday,” and it was Monday. We scanned the fabric so we could reproduce the pattern, and printed it on some fabric they bought. The point is that with traditional printing, it could never be turned around that fast.

CAN: What are your rates?

BB: It can be as low as $30 per yard and as high as $170. On the higher end, it includes the fabric. And we charge a color-matching fee of $25 per color.

CAN: Are you noticing a green trend with customers interested in eco-friendly dyes and fabrics?

BB: We are seeing a tremendous increase in queries about it. People want to print on soy-based and hemp fabrics.

I had a conversation recently about soy inks, which have loads of VOCs—volatile organic compounds. Arsenic is a VOC, for example. So while my inks aren’t organic, they have achieved a standard less toxic than natural dyes. The dyes we used are Oeko-Tex–certified.

With digital printing there’s very little waste of ink, whereas in traditional printing there’s a lot of waste that gets dumped in the river.

Chris HippsDirector of sales for textile color solutions for Datacolor

CAN: How did Datacolor begin?

CH: Datacolor was started 35 years ago to address color for industrial applications, including the textile industry. Color is one of the first aspects of a product you see. It sells the product, differentiates the product, and is an extreme indicator of quality. The company was founded to provide hardware and software solutions to allow manufacturers to get colors right and do it quickly for the lowest cost.

Since about 1997 the average growth in digital color for apparel brands is about 120 percent year over year. That means a file that can be e-mailed back and forth, rather than a sample that’s mailed.

CAN: Who are your customers?

CH: Large retailers, branded apparel companies, and dye manufacturers. In the retail apparel brand arena, we have around 80 percent market share.

CAN: What do your products do?

CH: Instead of relying on a visual, subjective process, our instruments and software use a digital format to come up with a lot of different ways to make color that can be evaluated quickly without having to make a lot of samples. In the old days, you had to make samples until you got the color right.

The other thing we do is help companies understand the quality of color. So a designer sets a standard, saying this is the color I want this golf shirt to be, and what the technology does is, throughout the supply chain, the standard is measured, it’s made digitally, it can be e-mailed throughout the supply chain so everybody knows what the target is.

Once you have a specification, you can determine if you’re on spec or off. And if you’re off, you can determine what you need to do to get on and match your color.

CAN: How are the specifications created?

CH: By using spectrophotometers that measure color. Every color has its own fingerprint. That becomes the specification, the file that you can compare to another color made in China to determine if it is the right specification.

CAN: What’s the price range for spectrophotometers?

CH: You’d be looking at somewhere between $10,000 and $30,000.

CAN: What are your other key products?

CH: We also have a product called ENVISION that allows for color to be accurately viewed on a computer screen. Calibrating a monitor and printer to the same standards as a spectrophotometer allows for unmatched reproduction on-screen and print proofing.

ENVISION simulates appearance by combining texture and color, which allows for rapid virtual prototyping, which saves time and money in product development. And as a virtual light booth, ENVISION can be used daily to approve or reject samples that have been submitted digitally from across the world.

CAN: Anything else?

CH: CERTIFIED is a universal color accreditation program that will standardize color process requirements and grade color performance levels for the apparel industry.

The program is designed to improve quality color collaboration and provide retailers with a cost-effective, timely, and trustworthy source for color assessment. CERTIFIED grades potential color performance levels based on annual assessments of a mill’s accreditation results and associated hardware, software, operators, and working environment. The program also offers remote diagnostics and frequent reporting, improving visibility of system performance and color compliance throughout the year. The program is open to retailers and brands regardless if they use existing Datacolor products and services.

Tod SchulmanVice president of fashion and home for Pantone

CAN: What is Pantone’s primary business?

TS: A lot of people think we make two things: ink for printing and dyes for fibers, neither of which we do. We’ve developed the color standard, a dictionary of color used by the industry. The Pantone system for fashion and home has 1,925 colors. Our product is the color book with swatch cards; people can also buy the cards individually for $8.50. We also have licensed relationships with many software companies that have our color system built into their programs.

CAN: Tell us about the re-launch of your flagship swatch book.

TS: In March we introduced Pantone SMART Color Swatch Cards, a re-launch of the color system we’ve been using since 1985. Now it’s being manufactured in a very different way, because there’s been a change in the workflow process out in the marketplace.

One of the biggest problems for us in the past with the way the system was originally manufactured was our color cotton material was mounted to an index card, and on the printed card you’d have the color name and number. What’s happened over the past few years, with more companies using digital equipment, is that they’ve found that the card mounting was interfering with digital measurements. Now we have the SMART card, where the fabric is not adhered to the card, so people who need to digitally evaluate the shade can take the fabric, fold it over, and put it in a spectrophotometer, which, according to international standards, is the way to accurately read the spectral data of the color.

CAN: What else did you do to improve the system?

TS: We also reformulated all 1,925 colors in the textile system by creating a partnership with dye manufacturer Clariant. Its dyes are available all around the world, and customers can also use our new Web site, MatchPantoneColors.com, to help users find appropriate dyestuff recipes to match our colors on any fabric.

Today, design and product people are being pressured to bring products to retail much faster; they have to make sure that whatever they’re providing as color standards can be exactly matched and managed.

And the lead time to create a quality color standard can take eight weeks or longer. The color development process has to work more quickly so people can both improve color and get it into production much faster.

CAN: What takes so long?

TS: You’d be surprised. You have to give physical samples to manufacturers, and they have to then take that color and do a lab-dip process on the fabric you’ve contracted for.

CAN: But with a company like Datacolor, can’t you just e-mail files back and forth?

TS: Here is the misconception: The software and hardware Datacolor uses is to quicken the process. It does not eliminate the need for an original sample of the color, nor does it ever replace the approval swatch that a designer or product manager will always receive from a vendor.

The fashion industry still lives by samples: We may use a computer to quicken the process of managing it, but we’ll still always look at physical things.

CAN: How else does your system help companies?

TS: Our system is for people who need an organized way of communicating. The product-development process has become very tedious over the years, and there can be a tremendous lack of communication—especially if you’re dealing with a mill that’s far away, where English is not their first language. What you want to do is take the subjectivity out of what you’re trying to express in terms of color, and be able to point to something and say, “This is precisely what I’d like.”

CAN: What other industry trends are you noticing?

TS: The bigger firms have basically said, “Okay, design department, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, but I’d like to take the task of managing the process away from you and put it in the hands of a quality management department.”

When I was in retail 20 years ago, I had to do everything. Now you have specialists deal with certain aspects of the product-development cycle.