Have you recently added heat transfer decoration to your core promotional products offering? How is it going? Are you still in the planning stage? Are you having second thoughts? Are you in the first stages of adding apparel decoration to your promotional product offering? Is it going well or is the new offering failing?

It is scary to watch your ideas fail, especially when you had high hopes for a new addition to your lineup. Especially when you had the buy-in, trusted your gut, empowered your team, and were methodical in the planning stage.

Assuming you are early in the process and just starting to see the possible failure on the horizon — or if you are still in the planning stage — conducting a thorough re-examination of the key elements of your business and the new plan will help you correct your course or revise the direction you are about to take.

Evaluation of the Pros and Cons

Before you make a list of the pros and cons of adding apparel decoration to your offering, you must first put things in perspective. This will help you make a thorough, meaningful list of pros and cons.

Refocus on the goals: What are they? What is working in the new plan? Why is it working? Ask yourself, do you want to go back? Analyze the position your business is in now and start with your existing customers.

Your existing customer base is the perfect place to start.

Make a list of the top 20 clients you have that represent an average customer profile for your business. Do they need apparel decoration? If so, where do they currently get it? If they do get apparel from another company, what kind of volume is it? How frequent is it? Are these high-end or price-sensitive purchases?

Determine if you have an existing customer base you can exploit to win their apparel decoration business. The volume, types of items, and quality level are all important in determining the decoration technique.

Next, analyze the decoration process — in this case heat transfer vinyl (HTV) — and contrast the skillset needed against the hardware and knowledge base existing already in your company.

While adding HTV in-house as your initial decoration technique is a low-cost, high-variation option, fulfilling orders can be challenging due to the restraints of the decoration process and your existing in-house capabilities. Let’s look at the drivers for apparel decoration and list the pros and cons from the exercise.

Apparel decoration consists, primarily, of four techniques: screen print, embroidery, heat transfer, and digital decoration where we lump direct-to-garment (DTG) and sublimation together for the purposes of this article. Each technique has its own strengths and weaknesses.

In examining screen print, embroidery, and HTV, the benefits and challenges of each are apparent.

Screen Print

Challenges

• Small, fine details can be hard to achieve with screen print
• Requires high knowledge base to achieve good output in design and production
• Start-up costs can be high

Benefits

• The best option for large-volume projects
• Can be the least expensive per unit cost
• Once established, equipment is durable and reliable

Embroidery

Challenges

• Can be expensive
• Embroidery is generally limited by the thread colors available and may not be ideal for a multi-color logo
• Small details can be hard to embroider
• Is not well-suited for some polyester and nylon textiles

Benefits

• Produces a high-quality output, best suited for high-quality apparel
• Adds texture
• Durable

HTV

Challenges

• Single-color HTV not suited for high-volume production; printable HTV can be used for high-volume projects; however, having the equipment in-house can be expensive
• To achieve quality output, must use quality HTV material
• Can be labor intensive to weed depending on design
• Poor-quality HTV is not durable

Benefits

• Excellent for lower-volume projects and projects where modification or addition of details to an already-produced run are required
• Can be used on hard substrates to decorate items and fabrics other decoration techniques can’t be used on
• Quality HTV can be used on a variety of textiles and substrates
• Can create small, fine details
• Quality HTV is durable

Focus on HTV for Promotional Products Offering

Back to the evaluation of your business where it is now: Regardless of whether you have already committed to HTV decoration or if you have not yet committed, there are other factors that are beneficial or challenging, depending on the factors discussed earlier.

Overall, HTV is an excellent starter decoration technique for the following reasons:

• It is easy to scale
• The investment is minimal
• The footprint in your shop is small
• The technique allows for the widest breadth of apparel decoration
• The output is appealing
• The HTV material is soft and stretchy

HTV can present the following challenges for beginners:

• Learning the substrates, all the different textiles, is a learning curve (think scorched fabric)
• Learning the different HTV materials requires a learning curve
• Detailed designs, with a lot of centers and fine detail take time to weed
• Unless you are printing, HTV color selections are finite

Once mastered, HTV is a fine decoration technique to add in-house for any promotional products offering. Other decoration techniques likely also fit your business model. Screen print and embroidery are great options to start with by outsourcing these projects. Digital decoration techniques — DTG and sublimation — are additional decoration techniques easily brought in-house as well should your business plan allow it.

The reality is all these techniques are complementary to each other. Each has its shining star benefit, and each has its no-way-to-work-around challenge. No matter what you decide to bring in-house, having access to all of these techniques will result in a robust apparel decoration output guaranteed to increase your business.