For years, Chuck Northcutt Jr.’s wife listened to him complain about the time-consuming challenge of pre-treating dark shirts so they can be embellished by a direct-to-garment digital printer. If it is that much of a hassle, his wife politely suggested one day, why don’t you do something to make it better? Says Northcutt: “She said, ‘You’ve been doing this a while and you know a lot of people in the industry … you’ve got to be smart enough to figure something out.’ ”

As it turned out, he was.

The owner of Creative Promotions Inc., a Seattle-based apparel decorating firm, recently started www.DTGReady.com, a website through which decorators can buy specially manufactured dark shirts that are pre-treated and ready to run through digital apparel printers. In a pre-launch phase, www.DTGReady.com has a stock of 1,500 shirts available for sale to decorators in maximum batches of 12. Northcutt hopes shops that buy the shirts will provide feedback – there’s a form on the site for doing that – so he can make any necessary tweaks before investing in an inventory of about 60,000 pieces.

The shirts have a number of major advantages, says Northcutt. First, they save decorators time, allowing them to bypass the whole pre-treatment fiasco. Secondly, the fabric is treated during the manufacturing process, meaning the entire shirt is coated evenly, resulting in no treatment inconsistencies that can ruin a final design. Says Northcutt: “Before, if someone wanted 72 shirts, it would take hours and hours to pre-treat them, and inevitably you’re going to lose a few of them. Now, you don’t have to worry about that.”

Read the rest of the Stitches Magazine article.