Mass Customization needs Fashion

In part 3 of the series on trends and challenges in the on-demand apparel industry I would like to focus on why mass customization means fashionable. What Spread Group is doing to meet the growing need for more fashionable products which can be printed on with the current state of the art techniques like digital direct.

The link to the corresponding video can be found below the text if you’d prefer listening and watching.

As people have moved away from print-on-demand we have seen a definite change in fashion. Ten years ago, when I first arrived in this business I was horrified by the standard of the print-on-demand base products. It tended to be Lego brick colours; bright yellow, bright blue. Designed for school teams, for fun, with very little choice in cuts and fits. Even when doing big corporate events the standard was you just get a white t-shirt in men’s extra-large and give it to everyone in the team, even if it’s a petite woman.

That has gone away. Over the last ten years there has been a migration and demand from consumers for much more fashionable wear, so they can wear whatever they like. And what they’re looking for is everyday wear. They care about the message they put on, but they want it to be something they can wear all the time, and feel it is part of their normal look, not something that’s a bit awkward because it’s print-on-demand.

For us that meant that several years ago we had to launch our premium range. We realised that 70% of the end-consumers of printed products were women and they didn’t like the neck cut for men. They wanted a much wider range of sizes, fits, necklines, etc. Men also wanted a wider range of styles. We also had to adapt those shirts and products to be optimised for direct-to-garment digital printing, because back then everything was optimised for screen printing. Now I knew when I started that we were forced to do it, we didn’t have a choice and it was a lot of work, but we now have it running quite nicely.

In my final year at Spread Group we definitely see brands that have brought the range of colours up to fashion colours, the neck cuts in women’s lines. Nevertheless when we went into testing for direct-to-garment printing, they still did not compete on the print tests. They did not last and did not provide the quality, that the consumer would like to have once you wash and tumble ten times.

So the challenge is out there still. There are some up and coming brands suppling the industry. But in the next three years they have got to get that to a quality that works for direct-to-garment printing. The quality of our base products is still not up to competitive High Street standards from printing on demand through to direct-to-garment. This is an industry wide challenge.

Consumers are still suspicious of print-on-demand quality and so are large business-to-business organisations and sports groups. Their view is that the base products is not as good as the High Street, although we’re very close! It’s just going to take a push in the next couple of years from some of the apparel providers to provide a premium product. We would be very happy if they could do this as it is 40% of our items and millions of items a year. But right now, there is no provider who is able to do that, and it needs to change very rapidly, if we’re going to bring that late majority of consumers and businesses groups into our market.