Direct to garment printing (DTG) is a process that digitally prints practically any photo or file directly to a garment.  These printers have revolutionized the garment industry.

DTG is perfect for “one off” and small runs of hoodies and T-shirts.  The setup for DTG machine takes much less time and energy and is less expensive than silk screen.

FEWER CHEMICALS

We do not pretreat our garments.  We do not use phthalates, nitrates, acrylic polymers, or formaldehyde on the clothing we produce.  Imagine wearing a shirt with known carcinogens heat-set into the fabric!  Who would do that?  And what is a phthalate?  These nasty chemicals are used by some other companies to make the ink adhere to their shirts.  We do not use any of these chemicals since we don’t pretreat our garments.

WATER BASED INKS

RipTide Threads uses water based inks in all of its digitally printed garments.  The ink does not sit on top of the garment like with silk screening. The ink actually binds with the cotton in the material.  Since the ink is part of the garment, it has a soft feeling.  You cannot feel the print.

This water based technology works best with white, pastel, and light color shirts.  The material shows through the print on darker shades of clothing.  That’s why we don’t do black or dark shirts.  To do them we would need to pretreat with the nasty chemicals we already mentioned.