Page 36 - Prnt21 magazine Jan-Feb 2023

| Textile Printing |Opportunity
Print DTG yourself or with UltraColour
wave. In fact Carroll and his team of what was then 10 staff had just two weeks to get through the border, which opened and then snapped shut for another year. Mandy Olivier, who was already based in Brisbane, took over the general manager role, helping to ground Carroll’s visionary approach.
The move has clearly worked. Those ten staff have now quadrupled to 45, and the company is now looking for four or five additional staff. In addition, there are now four apprentices from the local TAFE. The one screen printing line has now been joined by two others, giving UltraColour a fleet
of three fully automated INO high volume lines – manufactured in Europe – that are operating sixteen hours a day. One is dedicated to screen-printing, one to powder,
and one to printing numbers for sporting codes. The original HP Indigo that represented a huge investment for the business when it was getting going seven years ago has just been replaced by the latest version of the Israeli technology. And it has a long-term HP Indigo man, 30-year veteran Glenn Ellis, as its main operator.
UltraColour Transfers uses a combination of technologies, it screen prints the base to give
Printing onto t-shirts, sports shirts, tote bags and the like is potentially one of the best ways for print businesses to increase their revenue streams. Velflex will enable print businesses to do just that themselves, Tor through its UltraColour trade arm.
The demand for localised product is surging, as the shipping crisis is leading to strong on-shoring, a move that is also being driven by the demand for next day rather than in eight weeks’ time, and the increased challenges of ordering product from China.
But how do you get started? And what about those tricky jobs? Fast- growing trade supplier Velflex is able to answer both those questions, as the company provides consumables, hardware and training for would be garment decorators.
For those jobs that are too tricky to produce in-house Velflex has another solution, its sister business UltraColour Transfers is a trade- only printer providing ready- to-press, full-colour digital and screen-printed transfers.
UltraColour Transfers was founded by Ben Carroll eight years ago in Sydney. The company upped sticks and moved to Brisbane right in the middle of the first big Covid
he digitisation of print is opening up new market opportunities for print service
providers, as the old skill and technology silos melt away.
And one of the biggest of all is
in personalised, promotional, sports and leisure wear. New print technology for printing onto fabric is inexpensive, easy to operate, and well within the reach of almost all commercial print businesses.
The market for printed t-shirts, sports shirts, tote bags and the like continues to grow each year.
Above
Treble-up: Mandy Olivier and Ben Carroll in the factory with three fully automated screen printing lines
36 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2023