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In the t-shirt printing industry over the past few years, it has been trendy for companies to offer “Environmentally Friendly” printing services to their clients. Usually what they are really promoting is printing t-shirts with water based inks.

Now as someone who is an industry insider, let me shed some light on the reality of the situation.

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All t-shirt suppliers use this code when describing their different garment options, and you might have been wondering, what is GSM? We thought we might go through that for you to help clarify this term.

GSM stands for Grams per Square Metre – so it’s referring to the weight of the fabric. However, a lot of people often form the opinion that lightweight fabric equals poor quality and heavyweight fabric equals good quality…..this is not always the case!

In fact, a lot of t-shirt suppliers who have lightweight t-shirts available actually charge more for this option.

So what does equal quality?

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A few months back we were sifting through our enquiries we get through the website, and we came across an intriguing email. It read…

“Good afternoon from the UK. I am writing because I have a request. I work for a company called FESPA, we are a federation of associations in the Screen and Digital print industries. We also arrange events and exhibitions for the industry. In October this year we have an exhibition in Singapore (FESPA Asia www.fespaasia.com) Having identified your company as being the leader in online screen printing in Australia, I would very much like to have a conversation about the potential of your CEO/Managing Director being able to present to other screen printers in the Asia Pacific Region at our event. I look forward to hearing from you.”

Now…we do get all kinds of spammers through the website, so initially I put this down to some sort of Nigerian scam, but it certainly stroked the ego a bit so I had to check it out.

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Ok…so we have been doing a lot of discharge printing lately and have got it down to a fine art!!

What is discharge printing? Have a look at the video below and keep reading to find out more…(WARNING: Loud music alert in the video!)

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We have been stoked to work with Earth Hour over the last couple of campaigns to provide their t-shirt printing.

This year we donated the wardrobe for their TV commercial. All those people are wearing trackies and t-shirts that we supplied. They prepared a special branded copy for us. You can see it below…

Here is what was involved with doing their t-shirts…

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This week we had the pleasure of printing t-shirts for the John Butler Trio.

Pictured above is a 6 colour discharge print. Discharge printing allows you to have a very soft feel on dark t-shirts. It basically removes the dye colour in the t-shirt and replaces it with the colour mixed into the discharge ink.

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How do you like getting free stuff?

Last year, my email marketing service provider, MailChimp, sent me out a free t-shirt – http://blog.mailchimp.com/holiday-shirts/ – A cool print on an American Apparel tri-blend t-shirt.

Now for someone who deals with t-shirts all day, every day, you might not think that would be so cool, but honestly I was stoked.

I just got their newsletter and they had a little piece in it about visiting their t-shirt printers and at the end linked to an article by Adam Nash , VP of Product Management at LinkedIn.

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Whether we like it or not, T-shirts that have been made in Australia are often more expensive than those imported from various other countries in the world, and most Australians aren’t so patriotic as to automatically spend considerably more on a T-shirt simply because it was made in Australia.

Any business wishing to compete with low-cost alternatives needs to provide additional sources of value to its customers, to warrant the difference in price.  Money talks, but thankfully, it isn’t the only voice we heed.  We also believe that we get what we pay for.

So what are these additional sources of value?  Why buy Australian made T-shirts, rather than the cheaper ones imported from overseas?

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Besides providing highly amusing free entertainment, people-watching can be a great source of inspiration for all creatives and business people.  For example, let’s take a look at some tactics T-shirt designers might use to get creative inspiration from people-watching.

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At the age of 69, Toby is a fit and energetic man who’s still heavily involved in the daily operations of his industrial plumbing business.  He calls himself a realist, and he has a self-professed distrust of advertising.  He won’t watch commercial television or listen to commercial radio, and if he spends time on the internet, his wife closes the door on him to muffle the sound of his non-stop grumbling about marketers being brainwashers.

Toby’s not unusual.  People want information, but they want it at their own convenience – more often than not, they’ll hang up on telemarketers, delete spam emails, mute the TV when commercials are on, and pointedly ignore billboards while driving.  It can be really hard for a business to make potential customers aware that it even exists, when so many of those people are determined to close their eyes, block their ears and sing “blah-de-blah-de-blah-blah, I can’t hear you!”  The money you pour into advertising can easily disappear straight down the drain, resulting in very little, if any, return to you at all.

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