In recent years embossing has become a highly attractive and interesting way for many clothing brands to offer something different.
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We find the same logic as always in the market. A big clothing brand presents personalised clothes with embossing and small brands want to do the same.
There's nothing wrong with this, quite the opposite. It's hard to be innovative in clothing decoration these days, as we know.
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But what is embossing?
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Embossing is not the printing of clothes; it is an application that is widely used in the automobile industry and which a few years ago was "transferred" to the printing sector.
Embossing is the lifting of a specific area of a T-shirt or garment by means of a mould and the application of heat.
The high pressure combined with the high temperature will mould the cotton semi-permanently to give the effect shown in the photo above.
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Fantastic, isn't it? So what's the problem?
The problem has to do with scale, which is actually always the big problem with textile decoration. A big clothing brand is able to achieve a certain result because it has scale, it sells a lot. With this you can take an initial investment of many hundreds or thousands of euros and dilute it into tens or hundreds of thousands of garments, making it insignificant.
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A small clothing brand no longer has this option. And that's really what we're talking about. Embossing has an extremely high initial investment.
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The production of the mould is extremely expensive. We're talking about kilos of metal, hours of work on a CNC machine and various tests. Isto custa facilmente largas centenas de euros, por vezes milhares.
This can easily cost hundreds of euros, sometimes thousands. Then there are all the logistics and other costs of decoration and the machinery needed to apply the mould. It's easy to see that if you want to print T-shirts, you'll probably have to choose other alternatives.
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What alternatives are there?
Fortunately, there are much cheaper options on the market, both in screen printing and flex / vinyl.
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We can easily use relief inks in screen printing at extremely low cost (just a 10 per cent increase on our screen printing tables) and with a minimum of 24 garments. These paints react with heat, expanding as they pass through the oven.
Is the result the same? No. But it's more permanent and costs a tiny fraction of embossing.
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We also have this option for cutting flex if you want even smaller quantities.
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In this case we start with a film of a few millimetres, which is then cut and applied to T-shirts or other personalised clothing.
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In both cases, we really do need to apply it to the garment, so we don't get the exact effect of the embossing, but the cost goes from thousands to tens or hundreds of euros. You can justify it 🙂
