On the 11th of November, 2021, we were fortunate to chat with Michael Hawke, President of Emerson Design. Michael goes in detail about the process of printing digital textiles, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of it, and how it compares to traditional printing methods such as rotary printing. We would like to thank Michael for his time, and all his experience and knowledge that he shared with us.
Interview conducted by: Sara Al-Basha, Maryam Kakal, Lucille Trepanier
Transcription by: Viraj Odedra
Could you please introduce yourself?
I'm Michael Hawke. I'm the president of the Emerson group.
What is digital textile printing? What's the process of it, and how exactly does it work?
There's four steps to it. Unlike traditional printing, there's a pre-treat, and in traditional printing, they mix the ink and the pretreat together. Because of the thickness of the pre-treat, kind of like a honey-type mixture, it can't go through a digital printhead, so we need to pre-treat the fabric. After the fabric is pre-treated, we then digitally print it on a sticky bed so the fabric comes up and it sticks onto a sticky belt. Then the digital printhead goes back and forth, we get files digitally, and they are run through a RIP software so it'll break it into the colours. We actually use seven colours when we print: we use CMYK, and then we use an orange, a blue, and a red as well. We try to obtain as many colours as possible through digital printing.
Once we print that, you have to do what's called post treatment, which is called fixation. To do fixation, you have to run it through a steamer, and it has to be in the steaming chamber for around 12 minutes. Then the pre-treat and the dye that we're using—we use reactive dye. There are four different dyes in digital printing. The reason it's called reactive dye is there's actually a reaction between the dye, and the substrate we're going on. So if it's a cotton, whether it's a plant or animal, the pre-treat actually is like a catalyst, and it triggers the dye and the fibers to bond together. Once it's steamed, there's a last process where it has to go through a washing system, and not all of the dye is bonded with the fabric, so the excess dye has to be washed off so that it becomes like clothing or upholstery. So you wash the excess dye off, and then it's basically like traditional printing. The dye is now bonded with the fibers, and if you wash it again, there's always a little bit of dye coming out.
That's kind of how digital printing is working, opposed to traditional like rotary printing; basically all the dye and the pre-treater, all as one, still have to go through the same systems. They print it, they have to make screens, and then they add each colour to each screen, so you can have four colours—depending on the press, you can have up to 12 colours, and it runs very quickly compared to digital printing. One of the fallbacks is that you're a lot slower, but there's a lot of pros and cons to that, where we can change the pattern every yard, so you can have different colour ways, and you can change them very quickly in digital printing. in traditional printing, by the time you set up a press and get rolling. they're going to want minimums, like 500 to 1000 yards. Where in digital print, we can offer one yard of printing, because there are no boundaries on a digital file.
How does Emerson Design’s process differ from traditional digital textile printing?
Traditionally, they're going to make screens, and run on a very quick traditional rotary screen printer, where we're running it all digitally, and we are taking in digital files. The way we do it is we started a website, which is called Design Your Fabric, and it allows people to come in on our site, upload their designs, and they can do a few things by stepping and repeating it, they can do it like a block, or they can do it as one image. Then they can also make a shopping list of which fabric they want it printed on, so when they come in on the site, they can upload, pick the fabric they want printed, and then they can also print one yard or numerous yards. What we do is we gang orders, so if there's one yard on a certain fabric, for example French Twill, we'll wait until we get 10-20 yards, and then we'll run all those orders at once. After it's steamed and washed, we'll cut each order out and send them out. So that's why we have somewhere between a 10 and 12 day turnaround, because we're waiting on orders to gang up and it's cost effective. It doesn't make a lot of sense to load the fabric, run the yard, and run it. That's kind of how the site works, opposed to traditional printing, they're going to want minimums—they're going to want you to say “Okay, I need at least 500 yards”, and that's where the big difference comes between digital and traditional printing.
What kind of impact can digital textile printing have on the environment?
You don't have to do the minimums, so what happens is in traditional printing, they have to commit to long runs, and not all that product gets sold, so there's a lot of waste because maybe that pattern or style is not a big seller. With digital printing, you think of it as on demand, so if I need one shirt or one design, you can print it on demand, so it can really help on an e-commerce site, for example. They could order one design at a time, and then finish that product, so that's kind of where you're going to benefit from digital printing. You're not going to have a lot of waste. It's also all water-based dyes that we use, so as far as going into chemicals and that kind of stuff, we're not using a solvent-based ink or anything like that.
Keeping in mind this sort of sustainable aspect of digital printing, how prominent is digital printing within the textile industry? Is it something that people choose to use, or is it widespread within the industry?
It's growing. One of the things I mentioned is that it's slow, but it's becoming quicker and quicker. There's newer machines that are always being developed, and they're starting to catch up in speed with traditional, so I think they have to get to a certain production level to compete with pricing, because the cost of digital printing is a lot more than traditional printing because of the process being slower and a little more time consuming. With traditional printing, they can go at such rapid speeds and so quickly that they can charge less money, but again they're wanting minimums, where digital you're to have to charge a lot more for a short run compared to traditional printing.
Are there any disadvantages that you can think of for digital textile printing?
There's a few more steps in it, because we have to pre-treat the fabric which is just one more step you have to do, as opposed to traditional, they can mix the pre-treat and the dye together, so they don't have that step. It's a little bit of a slower process.
You mentioned pre-treating the fabric, so that's one sort of equipment that Emerson would use. Are there any other specialty equipment that Emerson in particular uses for printing digital textiles?
We make our own pre-treat, so we have a lab that we mix the pre-treat in, and then we have a padding system that pads the pre-treat to the fabric, which is a process that you have to do. You can, by outsourcing, buy the fabric already pre-treated for the dyes, and we use reactive dye, there's also pigment dye, where you don't need pre-treatment. It's bigger in the bedding industry. The hand or the feel of the fabric is stiffer than using reactive dye because pigment dye is very similar to latex paint. The disadvantage with pigment is that you don't get really dark, jet blacks, you get more of a charcoal black, so it's used a lot because you don't have to pre-treat, but it's more for pastel-type patterns and colours. There's another dye that's called acid dye, which is designed for nylon and silk. One of the only fabrics we can't print is nylon because we don't use reactive dye; we have in the past, but we can print reactive dye onto silks, and it does a really good job. The problem with reactive dye going on nylon is the black ink washes off it, because nylon's a bit of a synthetic product, so it doesn't hold. With polyesters, we use what's called dispersed dye, and that's for synthetic fabrics, and so we print on a lot of polyesters as well. With the polyester, the difference in the fixation is you can use steam, but you can also use heat at a very high temperature, which is called a calendar, which you can run through at 400 degrees. You can't use naturals with heat because they burn.
How many presses does Emerson have at the moment?
We have twofold, because not only do we do textile printing, we do large formats, like museum, theater, and TV show backdrops. We have [six] printers: our biggest machine is 16 feet wide that we print very large movie backdrops on, and then we have two 10 foot wide machines, and we have three roughly sixty inch printers. They're all kind of designed to do different things. Two of the smaller ones are just dedicated to the textiles, so they only print reactive. All the bigger machines only print dispersed dye, which is designed for polyester based fabric, and then we have one more smaller polyester-based machine that we run all our polys through, because it's a different dye.
How did your website, Design Your Fabric, get started?
There's a company in the US that I've been watching, and we decided to invest some money into a website, so that designers could come in and upload their own designs. We built a site that we think is very e-commerce friendly for designers to come in, and then we have dropdown menus where they can pick their fabrics. For us, it was about getting the backend of the equipment. Getting a digital printer? Anybody can do that. The problem is you need to do the backend, which is the fixation and washing. We have a one full line that is a steamer washing system for the reactive dyes. We also have a polyester wash line as well. So we turned the printers into reactive to print digital fabric for cottons, linens, and silks. Then we finished building the site, and started advertising to get people to hit it up, and that's kind of how Design Your Fabric was born. It's just a brand inside the Emerson Group.
How much interest has this created? Has it helped Emerson?
Yeah, it's just given us another layer of offerings to our client base, and it's helped somewhat in our movie business, because we've got into the costume department as well, to do specialized printed patterns for stuff that they need in the movie business. So doing some naturals has helped us expand some of our client base.
What limitations do you think are slowing down the potential of digital textile content?
It's a very large investment, financially, to get into because it’s not just the printer, it's the pre-treater, it's the steamer, it's the washer—it can get very expensive to try and get into the game. A lot of the textile is coming from traditional textile sources like Turkey, India, China, and Italy. They're very large, they already have textile, and what they're doing is creating a digital department which gives them a bigger reach to do custom [textiles] and change patterns very quickly.
Do you think digital textile printing has the potential to surpass other textile printing methods such as rotary printing?
Yes. I was in Milan, maybe three years ago at a textile show, and they've got a couple printers out there that are going just as fast as traditional. Now we're talking about five million dollar machines, but they are coming to speed with digital printing. The technology keeps changing, and it'll just get better as time goes on.
How do you see the future of digital textile printing?
I think, in maybe five or ten years, it'll only be digital textile, because everybody wants something different, and they don't want to commit to certain patterns. With the speed increasing all the time, you're not going to have to make screens and take a long time to load up these machines. I’m not saying it's going to go away totally, but over time, just like the paper industry, it started going digital, and it's going more and more digital than traditional, and textiles are not far away.
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