Give a DAM About Customized Apparel Printing
The following article was originally published by Wide-format Impressions. To read more of their content, subscribe to their newsletter, Wide-Format Impressions.
The advent of digital printing — and specifically digital apparel printing — has opened up a vast market for customized and even personalized apparel and other items. While this has created extremely lucrative new opportunities for printers, there are challenges, not the least of which is that the nature of the customized beast is shorter print runs, and thus being able to amass enough of them to make the venture profitable. At the same time, production needs to be highly streamlined to turn these jobs over as quickly as possible.
These are important concerns, as personalization is here to stay and the “blank canvas” is on its way out. Learn how to address these and other issues on Tuesday, October 10, from 1 to 2:15 pm, in Room 335, in the session “‘DAM Good Art’: Changing Product Customization in the Apparel Industry” presented by Nathan Anderson. This informative session will teach apparel printers how to provide customers with high-quality, customizable designs that take only seconds to create, allowing you to minimize your effort, and maximize your profit.
You’ll learn:
- The details of the growing market for personalized and customized apparel
- How to develop a library of standard templated designs
- How those templates can be easily customized
- How to incorporate customizable templates with web-to-print
- How to use “digital asset management” (DAM) to automate customized apparel printing
Anderson joined F&M Expressions in July of 2006 to create F&M’s first small quantity custom (Team Dealer) offering. Following Green’s acquisition of F&M in 2013, Anderson transitioned to running marketing for the entire family of companies. He led the development of the company’s web-to-print technology, a digital asset management system that serves up variable, data-driven graphics on the web and seamlessly outputs printready files formatted for any print method. He is currently leading the development of Ignition, a web software application that streamlines the fulfillment workflow of custom printed products. As a second-generation professional in the decorated apparel industry, Anderson carries a broad and diverse understanding of the many facets of the business. He utilizes the marketing, sales and customer service practices that drive the top line with a unique knowledge of the industry specific technology, manufacturing and operational factors that impact the bottom line.
