Page 38 - Print21 Jan-Feb 2020

Textile Printing
Innovation delivers for
and soon financial backer as the business quickly grew and changed the industry forever.
“I was lucky to have someone believe in me early on. As the business grew, Noel provided cash cheques initially to help with stock purchases and cash flow – always a debt to be paid back, but this allowed me to secure bank funding at a
later stage, once the business was operational and financially viable.”
However, the opportunity was becoming apparent to do something completely new – you have to meet
a real customer need for them to spend their money. Like many new businesses, Carroll found that he was ahead of the market with his new transfer materials, which enabled full-colour printing of garment transfers. He says, “Nobody had
wide format printers in our industry, unless you were a sign shop – but not embroiderers, not screen printers,
not interior decorators. So, after six months of hard and difficult sales,
we realised that there was a need for the solution with every customer that we went to – but they weren’t ready
to buy a printer nor the consumables. We created the printing side of the business, bought the print equipment ourselves, and went back to them with the service and said, ‘look, if you have a customer who wants a full colour logo, will you buy the transfer from us and press it on the garment yourself?’ A lot of them had heat presses already, and for those that did not, we could supply them with one. This meant that, for a low or zero investment, they were in the full-colour heat transfer business.”
Not surprisingly, almost all the potential customers came on board. For screen printers, it meant they did not have to print spot colours; for embroiderers, it meant any colour was now available. And there were virtually no set up costs either – certainly not when compared
with the cost of setting up a screen printing line – so that opened up the whole short run market.
Carroll got the distributorship
for heat transfer presses, and the manufacturing business boomed.
He says, “All of our customers
were buying lots of transfers. They then got the confidence to buy the printers themselves. So go back eight years ago, and we were having a field day selling wide format printers to the decoration market – the whole industry switched into digital.”
However, Carroll was then in the classic victim of his own
market growth
Velflex and Vicon Transfers CEO and owner Ben Carroll is one of the new generation of print entrepreneurs building businesses through innovation and enterprise. He gives Print21 editor Wayne Robinson an insight into the ups and downs of treading a new path.
Print is a multifaceted beast, and becoming more so as new digital technologies, new substrates and inks, and new data management
tools open up new opportunities for those who are able to look.
The industry is seeing an influx
of new young people who are taking
the bull by the horns and using
this new situation to develop niche opportunities for themselves, and in doing so going through the full gamut of business experiences, highs and lows.
Among the new generation of printers is Ben Carroll, CEO of both Velflex – which is a leading supplier of consumables and hardware for the heat transfer sector – and Vicon Transfers, an innovative trade-only service providing high quality transfers of fine detailed images and text.
Above: Bright future: Ben Carroll, CEO Velflex and Vicon Transfers
Carroll started working in Mascot next to Sydney Airport in the heat transfer space. It was his great uncle Noel Wighton who first started in the transfer industry with a company called Flexi Print, plastisol transfers the core of its activity.
“He never married, had no kids, he was a real entrepreneur at heart,” says Carroll. “He also started Australia’s biggest sports number manufacture Sports Numbers based on the Gold Coast, where he innovated the sports number space from flock to vinyl numbers. Then he retired, but while having a wine over dinner some three years later he passed me some insightful wisdom: the garment industry is ripe for digital printing. This was 14 years ago. He had foresight. So later that year, I started Velflex, and Noel became my mentor
38 Print21 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020