Meshtex printing services are a very long established UK based digital textile printing services provider, established about 50 years ago, initially offering services to the traditional rotary screen printing industry, for textiles and wallpapers.
One of the First Companies in the UK offering Digital Textile Printing.
We were one of the first in the UK to start offering digital textile printing services, installing our first Mimaki textile printer back in the late 90s, printing with reactive dyes.
Digital textile printing back then, however, was mainly restricted to sampling and very short run production, as it was generally considered too expensive vs traditional screen printing at that time, and it was painstakingly slow too, compared to rotary printing. So at the time, digital textile printing wasn’t our main service.
Please Note – any reference to lead times are a correct estimate at the time the article was published. Lead times are always estimated and never guaranteed, and for our current estimated lead times see: lead times & deadlines.
Over the years, traditional textile printing remained our main business, namely engraving rotary screens via our Stork laser engravers, and providing colour separation services to some of the UK’s most well known brands & print firms.
By late 2016, though, seemingly all of a sudden, digital textile printing had firmly become a part of the UK textile printing industry, not just for sampling and very small production, but as a big part of the commercial trade, and we wondered if we were too late in terms of becoming one of the major players in the digital textile printing market in the UK.
A bit of research told us that although there were a lot of digital textile printing companies in the UK offering to print on the roll and by the metre, most of these firms weren’t operating in our particular niche.
Many of the companies that had been set up to take advantage of this industry, were “web to print” firms, geared up for retail sales, allowing members of the public to order digitally printed stock fabric by the metre, and to upload their own designs and purchase their own custom printed fabric by the metre, or in fat quarters.
This isn’t what we offer. Although we do have low minimums, we’re a trade supplier, we’re geared up to supply to businesses – rather than to sell one or two metres at a time to retail customers. We offer lower pricing than most web to print textile printing companies, and we have sliding scale pricing which drops based on volume.
There are also many UK firms that are geared up to supply digitally printed textiles to the trade, some of which have been around for a long time too, but most of these firms are quite different to us when it comes to our particular strengths, and the kinds of businesses we mainly tend to work with.
Many other commercial digital textile printers are set up for much higher bulk production, and with this tends to come longer average lead times, higher minimum orders, and less of an inclination to put time and effort into having conversations with smaller businesses, startup brands, and designers & artists looking to produce their own printed textiles and textile products.
New customers often tell us how happy they are that they’ve found a trade printer who is willing to give them the time of day, basically, and that in the past they’ve found themselves having to fight quite hard to get the attention of print firms who don’t appear to be too interested in dealing with them.
While this obviously won’t include all other textile printing firms, there are many print firms that are structured mainly for dealing with bigger volume orders. Such companies might not want to come out and tell smaller businesses that they don’t want their business, but it’s often obvious in the way that they respond (or don’t respond) to such enquiries.
While we do print large orders too, in fact we have customers who place orders with us for hundreds, even thousands of metres at time, or hundreds or thousands of home textiles products such as tea towels, cushions, aprons or oven gloves – a big percentage of our customers are startups, new brands that are currently very small and are aiming to grow, and artists/designers who are wanting to be able to sell digitally printed fabric and/or home textile products made from their own digitally printed fabrics.
Dealing with such enquiries inevitably involves providing quite a bit of initial information, and answering a wide range of questions. This usually takes the form of multiple telephone and/or email conversations.
We’re more than happy to do this, and it’s something we’re very comfortable with. Some of the other printing firms, used to dealing with experienced textiles buyers, aren’t as accustomed to dealing with such enquiries, especially given that once this initial period of educating the new customer is complete, the initial orders aren’t usually at the level they’re used to taking.
So Meshtex hit the ground running with our digital textile printing services in 2017, quickly establishing ourselves as one of the leading fabric printing companies within our particular niche, printing for a large number of artists & designers, smaller brands and startups, as well as a number of well established, larger volume customers.
Cottons & Linens
While back in the 90’s we were printing onto cottons via reactive dyes, mainly for sampling purposes – we made the decision to print onto natural textiles (cottons & linens) via pigment inks.
Pigment inks for digital textiles were always great in theory, but not always great in practice.
Printing via water based pigment inks is a cleaner process than reactive dies, as there’s no chemical pre-treatment required, and no messy steaming and washing, but the problem with textile pigments is that they tended to block digital print heads.
Furthermore, up until fairly recently, the ink technology was in need of improvement. Pigment inks weren’t quite up to scratch with reactive printing in several areas, including rub fastness, wash fastness and vibrancy.
But when we began to investigate, we found that due to improvements in pigment inks over the years, digital textile printers running pigment inks were no longer having continual issues with blocked heads.
Additionally, we discovered that the leading pigment inks (including Mimaki digital pigment inks, which are the inks which we use) have come a long way in terms of overall performance.
Pigment inks are now on a par with reactive dyes in most areas including wash & rub fastness.
Pigment inks are also the superior process for textile printing when it comes to UV fastness, making it the preferred method for curtains and upholstery. In addition, we discovered that many fabrics were now available already coated with a pigment enhancement.
This treatment further improves colour definition and vibrancy, which helps to further bridge the gap between reactives and pigments in terms of vibrancy and definition.
Reactive dyes remain the most popular process for fashion textiles, as there are certain designs that just require that slight enhancement in vibrancy that reactives can provide in some cases.
But for home furnishings / home decor, upholstery & home textiles, pigment printing has fast become the most popular method over the past few years.
So we got setup with our first Mimaki TX300 digital textile printer running pigment inks, and we fairly quickly had to add a second TX300 in order to keep up with the demand.
Our pigment inks are water based, and it’s a very clean process.
We simply print directly onto the textiles, which are then put through our rotary heat press in order to fix.
Although pre-treated fabrics are available, and are advised for best results – we can print onto un-treated fabrics too, including certified organic natural fabrics.
Polyester Fabrics
We had natural textiles covered with pigment digital textile printing, but we were also finding a demand for digitally printed polyester textiles, and for manufactured products made from polyester fabrics.
The term “polyesters” tends to conjure a quite narrow set of images, which aren’t necessarily positive.
However, we quickly came to discover when we started to learn more about the modern polyester textiles now available, that this is very much an outdated perception.
These days, there are some incredible man made textiles that are either 100% polyester, or blends high in polyester, which lend themselves perfectly to specific requirements.
For example, there are an increasing number of alternative faux fabrics, vegan alternatives to popular animal-product based fabrics, such as suede, wool & silks.
There are an increasing number of polyester textiles made from recycled plastics, including fabrics such as Freemont Recycled, which divert almost 2,300 plastic bottles away from our oceans for every 50m used.
There are polyester fabrics with inherent fire retardancy, such as Plain Inherent FR, certified to particular FR specifications, which allow companies servicing the hospitality industry to supply higher quality FR textile products to higher end clients.
For more on our polyester fabrics, see: Some of our Popular Digitally Printed Polyester Fabrics.
So, if you’re looking for a UK digital textile printing service, for cottons, linens or polyester textiles, and if you’re looking for a high quality service, a high quality product, with competitive trade prices, low minimums, and market leading lead times, why not get in touch?