Kornit Mike Freeman, company director Nexgen.
Lower ink costs and higher production speeds? We spoke to our partner NEXGEN CLOTHING LIMITED, a clothing company based in Weymouth in Dorset, to check whether their Kornit DTG printer was living up to the sales pitch!
This is their Kornit success story!
Direct-to-garment machines are a great addition to screen printers because they enable the production of samples and fulfill low-volume orders at the touch of a button, without inefficient set up costs. But with this market continuing to grow, many screen printers are now investing in bigger, faster, and more efficient DTG machines to meet increased demand.
While Nexgen has the setup for large-scale screen printing, company director Mike Freeman was seeing more and more orders of low volume or even one-off prints that are most efficiently fulfilled by DTG equipment. “We’ve seen growth double year-on-year for the last four years,“ he says. Nexgen had some basic DTG equipment, but to increase their capability for low-volume orders they needed to invest in faster machinery. “The quicker we can get the job done in the day, the more orders we can process,” he explains.
“You can literally throw a t-shirt on the pallet, hit ‘print,’ and it will eject a t-shirt."
Kornit Nexgen.
Mike began to research the market for a bigger DTG machine to increase Nexgen’s capabilities in this market. As well as a higher production speed, Mike was looking to reduce ink costs, which were becoming increasingly expensive. “We looked to Kornit because we were led to believe it would be a cheaper per print cost,” he says. “There are obviously much cheaper systems, but they tend to be higher in consumption costs. We thought the other benefits that would come with the Kornit would include ease of operator use.”
The Kornit Storm platform caught his eye, not only because of its ability to deliver his initial spec, but also because of the additional benefit of a built-in pretreat system. “You can literally throw a t-shirt on the pallet, hit ‘print,’ and it will eject a t-shirt,” Mike says. “Until you get used to a system like that, you don’t realise how useful it really is. There’s no pretreat, no heat press – just print the shirt and put it through the dryer.”
Meeting 100% of the expectations: lower ink costs, higher production speeds, and total reliability
With the Kornit Storm Hexa installed for almost a year, Nexgen is seeing the effect it is having on their business. So is it living up to the sales pitch? “The biggest factors for choosing a Kornit were its cost per print and ease of use,” says Mike. “There’s no point being a busy fool in this industry; at the end of the day we want to make the most profit from what we’re selling. The Kornit has given us that; our ink costs have dropped and our production speeds are up. We have monitored it time and time again, and it does have an amazing cost per print.”
Reliability was another important factor for Nexgen. “We are printing every day, seven days a week,” Mike continues. “If the machine was to break down for a day in a busy period, we’re not going to catch up the next day without having a night shift. So far we’ve had no breakdowns and no severe issues where we’ve lost production.”
With production now able to meet demand, Mike can see this side of the business growing further. “Now we’re part of the Kornit family and using the machine more and more for every job we do, it would be nice to have the machine grow along with us,” he says. “If the time comes that we need to add even more Kornits, so be it.”
He concludes: “I’d recommend that anyone in a similar situation with similar production growth looks to Kornit as an option.”
Click here for more information on Kornit's DTG solutions.
You can view the success story video here.
