Every now and then something comes up that is different, like long sleeve t-shirts or discharge inks for t-shirt printing. This year is proving to be the year of the private label t-shirt with many companies selling the same thing, but with a different label. The market is now expecting even the smallest of designers to provide a private label t-shirt, as if they were a large company manufacturing every stage of the final product, even though they are simply printing a design on a manufactured product. The way to succeed in t-shirt printing is to brand yourself and by printing your own company logo or brand into the graphic and t-shirt let's people know that you are what you sell. The problem in the past has been figuring out how to get that label into your own t-shirts without having to make thousands of t-shirts and without manufacturing thousands of t-shirts in advance of when you actually need them.
The context of the wash out design concept is to reduce the life expectancy of the shirt and to limit the period of time that the manufacturer is responsible for the t-shirt. Let's assume that you are in the vintage clothing business and therefore you are selling items that are not new and thus they are being resold. A t-shirt with a private label is the same type of product, but the relabeling process is by itself creating a secondary market for a product that gives it a new and second life. If the design of the original manufacturer can be torn out or washes out, then that should be an acceptable process for relabeling a product, because it has also undergone a change of ownership with the second owner in the same way that a vintage clothing store is reselling clothes that have been owned before and therefore should not be required to list the same information that was required in the clothing's first life as a new product.
As a t-shirt printer the most important information that I need in a t-shirt is the size and cotton content. I work in a pretty limited range of materials, so 90% of the products I use are 100% cotton and a few t-shirts are 50/50 or a blend of some combination of cotton and polyester. When I sell t-shirts as a retailer the most important information is the size and the brand, which sometimes indicates the type of cut of a t-shirt. Still most of my retail t-shirts are 100% cotton and some heather t-shirts are 50-50 blends. If a shirt is sold with a
life expectancy of one wearing, then the labeling instructions should only need to be included with the garment for the period of time. The idea here is that a tear away tag with the basic information is sufficient until the garment is sold and a size and company brand information could be printed with ink that will wash out after the first use or when the shirt ends up in the wash for the first time.
In this case the first owner is the printer, who buys and embellishes the shirt with a screen printed design and may or may not remove the care instructions in favor of printing their own brand name. At that point the life expectancy of the blank t-shirt is complete from the manufacturer's standpoint. The new owner is the printer who can choose to brand the product to whatever degree they feel comfortable with. As a retailer I can choose to leave the tear away care label, which should also have the country of origin and size, while advertising the fact that the label can be removed easily by tearing it from the t-shirt. By printing the size with ink that can wash out, then a printer can remove the label on their own and still
be able to tell the size of the shirt, while proceeding with screen printing their own design which may include their own company or brand information. As the new owner it would be up to them to decide how much information should go on the t-shirts that they are selling, depending on the life expectancy of the garment for their market.
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