Hello Sign World! Another newbie here from Florida.
We invested heavily into a 45 mm Olfa cutter and found 5 feet of red scrap vinyl, so we are in the sign business.
Seriously: We have a custom t-shirt design and a manufacturing company now. We do DTG printing, apparel vinyl, rhinestone embellishment and embroidery, using a rhinestone placement robot, a Brother DTG printer, a Tajima embroidery machine and a Roland cutter. We do pretty well, especially with the DTG and the rhinestone shirts.
The sign business is totally new for us but we decided to jump head first anyway because our customers continuously requested banners, posters from us using our own custom t-shirt designs and/or their logos or messages. We needed an eco-solvent printer anyway for dark shirt heat transfers, so we ended up purchasing a Roland VS-640. A smaller printer-cutter would have been enough for the t-shirt heat transfers but it would have been too small for other purposes. The VS-640 is a great printer however. It seems that we will have no problem in the field of printed sign design; we use Photoshop, Illustrator, CorelDraw, Wilcom, VersaWorks, etc. every day, but we are totally lost in the fields of sign substrates, installation, pricing, etc.. Of course we do our homework diligently, learning as fast as we can about the different vinyl, paper, canvas and other special substrates but the devil is always in the details.
We have two potential - not too urgent - projects already but both of them are difficult for us. The first one is double sided paper poster printing, which - even with our “vast knowledge” - looks manageable, but the other one is an indoor display setup, where the half of the printed vinyl must be on the floor (with heavy foot traffic) but then it has to “curve up” high to the wall. I see (some) of the problems already (durability, safety issues, etc.) but there are still a lot of open questions about this job. If I will be prepared to ask meaningful questions I will do that. I don’t want to waste your time now with stupid requests.
This forum is unbelievably useful for us, newbies. Thanks for all your help in advance. I am also member in the t-shirt forums, and there I am in the position of contributing, helping out others. Here, I will be a burden for a while, but I will try to behave.
Finally, as you already noticed, English is NOT my native language. Please don’t hesitate mentioning if you don’t understand what I am saying. Don’t worry, you won't hurt my feelings. I have no self-esteem problems; I just don’t speak English too good. But I am working on it…
We invested heavily into a 45 mm Olfa cutter and found 5 feet of red scrap vinyl, so we are in the sign business.
Seriously: We have a custom t-shirt design and a manufacturing company now. We do DTG printing, apparel vinyl, rhinestone embellishment and embroidery, using a rhinestone placement robot, a Brother DTG printer, a Tajima embroidery machine and a Roland cutter. We do pretty well, especially with the DTG and the rhinestone shirts.
The sign business is totally new for us but we decided to jump head first anyway because our customers continuously requested banners, posters from us using our own custom t-shirt designs and/or their logos or messages. We needed an eco-solvent printer anyway for dark shirt heat transfers, so we ended up purchasing a Roland VS-640. A smaller printer-cutter would have been enough for the t-shirt heat transfers but it would have been too small for other purposes. The VS-640 is a great printer however. It seems that we will have no problem in the field of printed sign design; we use Photoshop, Illustrator, CorelDraw, Wilcom, VersaWorks, etc. every day, but we are totally lost in the fields of sign substrates, installation, pricing, etc.. Of course we do our homework diligently, learning as fast as we can about the different vinyl, paper, canvas and other special substrates but the devil is always in the details.
We have two potential - not too urgent - projects already but both of them are difficult for us. The first one is double sided paper poster printing, which - even with our “vast knowledge” - looks manageable, but the other one is an indoor display setup, where the half of the printed vinyl must be on the floor (with heavy foot traffic) but then it has to “curve up” high to the wall. I see (some) of the problems already (durability, safety issues, etc.) but there are still a lot of open questions about this job. If I will be prepared to ask meaningful questions I will do that. I don’t want to waste your time now with stupid requests.
This forum is unbelievably useful for us, newbies. Thanks for all your help in advance. I am also member in the t-shirt forums, and there I am in the position of contributing, helping out others. Here, I will be a burden for a while, but I will try to behave.
Finally, as you already noticed, English is NOT my native language. Please don’t hesitate mentioning if you don’t understand what I am saying. Don’t worry, you won't hurt my feelings. I have no self-esteem problems; I just don’t speak English too good. But I am working on it…
