STEPPING INTO DIGITAL TEXTILE PRINTING: WHY NOW IS THE RIGHT TIME TO JUMP IN? GUEST INSIGHTS WITH JOS NOTERMANS
“Businesses that transition 100% to digital may lose extreme price-driven customers, but this is a rare situation. A new range of affordable digital printers enables manufacturers to introduce digital printing capability alongside traditional printing methods. Some customers may be keen to experience the benefits of digital printing; others may need reassurance to develop the confidence to test digital printing technologies.” - JOS NOTERMANS SPGPRINTS
GUEST ARTICLE WRITTEN BY JOS NOTERMANS OF SPGPRINTS
Digital textile printing machines that can print production volumes have been around for over a decade now, but many rotary printing companies that are not yet using digital as a production method are concerned about making the switch.
They’re worried about how their customers will react. Will they really be willing to pay a premium for the flexibility of digital printing?
Transferring production to digital printing used to demand a significant investment – and a steep and sometimes scary learning curve – but things are changing. Adding digital printing capability can improve your business, helping you to carve out a competitive advantage. The key is to work with a partner that can work with you to select the suitable machine for your operation and market.
Why calculating TCO is crucial
Textile printing is a competitive industry where price matters. Each printing method has its advantages and challenges. Digital textile printing machines, for example, have low fixed costs per design, with customers paying the variable cost of each job. Printing a design with conventional textile printing (rotary or flatbed) has higher fixed costs, but these can be shared across more linear meters that have very low variable costs.
When we look at volumes, it’s clear that conventional textile printing is the cost-effective option for large volumes (5,000 meters+). The sweet spot for digital printing is below 2,000 meters as the fixed costs are low and the variable costs come only from a limited number of meters. Between 2,000 and 5,000 meters the most cost-effective method is determined by design-specific parameters such as the number of colours, the number of colourways or the complexity of the design.
Digital printing is often considered more expensive - when compared to rotary and flatbed machines – but the breakeven point is shifting in favour of digital. Instead of concentrating on upfront costs, it's critical that business owners consider the total cost of ownership (TCO) when deciding whether to go digital.
Businesses exploring whether to shift to digital textile printing are often scared by high upfront investment costs without considering all the other factors that affect the price. When comparing the costs of printing methods, you must include everything – including energy, labour, lead times, consumables and wear-and-tear parts (like printheads in digital). When you’ve processed the numbers, you may discover that the difference between conventional and digital textile printing is much smaller than previously thought.
The lesson: calculating the true TCO is crucial. Only by doing so can you make an informed decision on whether digital printing is a cost-effective option.
Delivering performance to justify premium
Digital textile printing is acknowledged as delivering higher-quality outputs, but are customers willing to pay the premium?
Firstly, as we've outlined above, the price difference is likely to be much less than you may have considered – so run the numbers. New developments are bringing down digital textile printing costs, including the costly print heads that regularly need to be replaced. Digital printers can now use pigment inks that deliver an excellent finished product at a competitive cost because there is no need for steaming and washing.
Businesses that transition 100% to digital may lose extreme price-driven customers, but this is a rare situation. A new range of affordable digital printers enables manufacturers to introduce digital printing capability alongside traditional printing methods. Some customers may be keen to experience the benefits of digital printing; others may need reassurance to develop the confidence to test digital printing technologies.
As a business, you must innovate. Transitioning to digital print is a journey that you – and your customers – need to go on.
Filling the skills gaps
Conventional rotary printers and digital printers use dramatically different technologies and components. Experienced in-house engineers can fix traditional rotary or flatbed printers, but what about digital textile printers?
SPGPrints operates a global network of service providers available to service, maintain, and repair digital printers. We will first attempt to fix your networked digital textile printer remotely. If this fails, an on-site technician will be dispatched to your location. They can be with you rapidly, often within 24 hours.
Our expert support can minimize downtime. As well as servicing and support, SPGPrints can use its unrivalled knowledge to provide you with advice and guidance on how to get the best from your digital printer. So whether you have a question about fabric-pretreatment, file corrections for the best printing result, or finishing, we're always happy to give you consultation based on our 70 years’ experience in textile printing.
Affordable, effective digital textile printing
SPGPrints has been at the forefront of industry innovation for decades. While we are known to deliver top quality at premium prices, we’re now very excited to launch Violet our first affordable digital textile printer. Today businesses of all sizes can afford to run a SPGPrints digital textile printer. Violet is our entry-level digital printer, and it completes our digital textile printing portfolio that includes Rose, Jasmine, Magnolia and PIKE machines. We’re able to support clients from entry-level machines to high-volume, top-quality digital textile printing technologies.
Here are some of the benefits of Violet:
Compatible with reactive as well as pigment inks, giving you the freedom to choose the best solution for the fabric you want to print
Complies with the latest legislation and safety certifications
Exceptional quality textile printing at an affordable price point for all businesses
Perfect balance between production speed, quality, and overall cost
Breaking down barriers to digital printing
Violet offers every textile printing company the chance to gain experience with digital textile printing services. It’s breaking down barriers for every business, delivering high-quality outputs at an affordable price. Operators can have the confidence that they’ll receive market-leading support from SPGPrints.
Violet delivers industry-leading outputs for a printer at this price point. Once you have gained confidence operating the machines and established a customer base, you can expand your capacity by adding more Violet printers, or maybe you’re even ready to invest in larger, faster machines like Jasmine or Magnolia to add to your capabilities.
Stepping into digital printing is easier than ever with Violet. Are you interested in learning more about how Violet could benefit your business?
Check out Violet’s technical specifications here.
Colour Is Too Important to Leave to Chance
Print will always be the part of the garment people see first.
But the sum of all parts — the fabric, the trims, the fasteners, the finish — is what determines whether a design actually delivers on its promise. Brands that continue to treat colour as a single creative decision, rather than a coordinated technical discipline spanning their entire supply chain, will keep paying for it in re-dips, delays, and disappointed design teams.
A Century of Textiles, and an Ever-changing World
Few companies can trace their roots back more than a century and still count themselves among their industry's innovators. Texia, headquartered in Monistrol de Montserrat, Spain, is one of them.
But the story of Texia is not simply one of longevity.
It is a story of continual reinvention. As the textile industry has grown more global and competitive, Texia has repeatedly reshaped its business, investing in technology, developing its own brands, and placing sustainability at the centre of its mission. In doing so, it offers a compelling example of how a heritage manufacturer can lead rather than follow through a period of profound industry change. Image Credit: Texia
What are we craving Ultimately?
The instinct to slow down while simultaneously optimising every measurable aspect of life isn't a passing curiosity. It's a structural response to a world that feels increasingly unstable, and it's reshaping what people expect from their homes, hotels, workplaces and healthcare environments alike.
For the design and manufacturing sectors, this means rethinking both product and process.
The Structual Shift is Real and its Already Here
Volumes are moving east, where digital production is accelerating rapidly. Consumer behaviour has shifted.
Demand is now driven by personalisation, shorter buying cycles, and an expectation of near-instant responsiveness. Regulatory pressure is intensifying, with supply chain transparency now a legal and commercial fact in many markets. And margins? They are under sustained, structural pressure.
This is not a temporary disruption. It is a fundamental reordering of how textile manufacturing must operate.
The Challenge: Standing Firm as the Industry Shifts
The wallpaper landscape has changed dramatically. Digital printing has lowered the barrier to entry, spawning countless direct-to-consumer brands and pushing much of the market towards faster, cheaper production.
At the same time, manufacturing in the UK has grown steadily harder - rising minimum wage, national insurance, energy and substrate costs all bear down on margins. Surface Print have embraced all of these challenges - and stand resolutely prepared for the future.
From Helsinki's printing mill to Paris's Le Marais, discover how Marimekko is scaling a design-led brand with purpose, craft, and bold innovation.
But what makes Marimekko's story compelling is not just its aesthetic legacy?
The word "toxic" carries weight. It conjures danger, harm, and things best avoided.
“Yet in the textile industry - Where between 3,000 and 10,000 chemicals move through the supply chain, a reflexive fear of the term is one of our biggest obstacles to progress.”
This article distils the key takeaways and what buyers, designers, and brands should be asking right now.
What Is the Digital Product Passport?
At its core, a Digital Product Passport is a digital record attached to a physical product - For a printed textile product, this means the DPP would capture data on the substrate, inks and dyes used, the printing process and technology, chemical compliance, environmental impact (including water and energy use), supply chain traceability, and end-of-life instructions.
The Market Gap that Changed Everything
Future Fashion was founded in 2019, timed deliberately to coincide with a pivotal moment in global textile technology: the commercial launch of the EFI Reggiani BOLT Single-Pass digital printing system.
The founders recognised that single-pass architecture had fundamentally changed what was industrially possible - and that Pakistan's domestic market had yet to catch up.
Print is no longer defined by the inefficiencies that once characterised it…as advances in production processes and technology have significantly improved its environmental performance.
Taran Rai, Corporate Sustainability Manager at Epson explains why?
The story of what happens when young designers access digital technology is still being written.
What once was a theoretical sustainability goal seems to have shifted into an active regulatory reality.
Is the Textile Market Finally Recovering?
After a difficult few years, there are genuine reasons for optimism. Duncan was candid about the challenges: "The market for textiles has been very difficult over the last three years. I'm not going to hide the truth there. But the tide is turning.“
A profound shift is currently reshaping the sector
Changing consumer expectations demand greater design diversity, faster turnaround times, and sustainable manufacturing practices.
To thrive, interior brands must adapt their supply chains, bringing production closer to the end consumer and moving away from bulk manufacturing.
Digital textile printing offers a definitive solution to these operational bottlenecks.
Digital transformation doesn't announce itself.
It accumulates - one innovation at a time - until an entire industry looks back and realises the ground has shifted beneath its feet. That's precisely where textiles stands today.
The conversations happening now about AI, automation, sustainability, and digital product passports are not theoretical. They are shaping decisions being made on factory floors and in boardrooms right now.
“By leveraging advanced digital textile printing, Marylene Madou has successfully merged traditional craftsmanship with cutting-edge technology. Her approach offers a blueprint for how independent designers can scale their brands globally while maintaining a minimal environmental footprint.”
The textile industry is undergoing a vital transformation. As the insights from Techtextil and Texprocess reveal, the path forward relies on a combination of sustainable hardware, intelligent chemistry, and seamless digital workflows.
From Zimmer's industrial-scale energy reductions and Stratasys's on-demand 3D embellishments, to Kornit's single-step technical printing and the unified digital ecosystems of NedGraphics and Optitex, the tools for change are here. To stay competitive, brands and manufacturers must adopt these innovations, moving away from fragmented, wasteful processes towards a truly connected, circular economy.
Friedmans stands as a testament to the power of combining traditional textile knowledge with forward-thinking innovation.
“Operating from their UK headquarters, Friedmans now serves a diverse array of sectors, including swimwear, dance, entertainment, sportswear, interior decor, prosthetics, and even pet apparel. With a strategic supply chain that reliably serves clients worldwide”
The apparel decoration industry is decisively moving away from isolated, analogue production tools toward connected digital manufacturing environments.
"Kornit’s unwavering commitment to transformative technology continues to disrupt the status quo. For business leaders and innovators ready to capture the future of apparel manufacturing, the path forward is clear”
The Urgent Need for Sustainability at Scale
The transformation at Coats provides a vital blueprint for the wider textile and apparel sector. True sustainability cannot be achieved in silos. As Dearing emphasised:
“Cross-industry collaboration is the engine of meaningful change. Brands, machinery suppliers, chemical providers, and fibre producers must act as an interconnected ecosystem”
Today’s customers demand superior product quality, real-time data visibility, and lightning-fast turnaround times.
For large-scale garment decorators, managing these expectations while balancing seasonal demand fluctuations - such as the massive surges seen during Black Friday - presents a monumental challenge.
"Relying on transactional vendor relationships and outdated legacy equipment is no longer sufficient to secure long-term stability and growth.”
Printing method is never a secondary detail. It shapes the entire life cycle of a product, from concept to customer. In today’s fashion industry, where margins are tighter and speed matters more than ever, technical knowledge has become a competitive advantage.
“The future of textile design belongs to professionals who can combine creativity with execution, aesthetics with practicality, and vision with production reality”.
![EDMUND BELL [PRINTLAB]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a802676b7411c2497540b80/1535628933285-QO8QXRA0U6Z52VO6DBWR/EDMUND+BELL-PRINTLAB-TEXINTEL.jpg)
