The Perils of Overseas Printing
And How We Saved the Day

It was Friday, 7:40pm, we thought the day was over. The weekend was rolling in.

We received an interesting request. One that had been pressing us for the last 3 days and finally had a break through. The client was Dr. Barbara Sturm , the German aesthetics doctor widely renown for developing cutting-edge treatments for inflammatory conditions like osteoarthritis. Termed the “Kobe Procedure” after her work with the late NBA basketball star Kobe Bryant.

The client originally printed 3,000 Tote Bags overseas, and to their dismay, received a product that had not been properly cured, was printed crooked, and the ink had been peeling or flaking off, so much so that influencers out and about taking photos, got caught in the rain and ink was running onto their outfits.

For two days leading up to that initial phone call, the client considered a variety of ways in which to fix the situation. They tried hiring printers to run the bags through high temperature conveyor dryers. Printing over the originally printed logo, you name it, nothing worked. And the event was taking place the following day. Without the Tote Bags, the promotional items would have been dumped into the hands and bags of visitors who stood in line outside 214 Lafayette Street, wrapped around the corner waiting to get in and experience the Doctors break through face serums, anti aging creams, and her scientific skincare products.

We had an idea, it would be crude but it could work (and it did).

DTF (Direct to Film) printing involves printing a design onto a special PET (polyethylene terephthalate) utilizing a DTF printer. But this fix would require a bit more. We proceeded to print out a few sheets of DTF Printed film. With a slight bordering overlapping the original print. A very linear fix, but it would go on to yield results.

As you can see, the sheets were printed using Black and White ink. Eliminating the possibility of transparency, or opacity working against us, in covering up the print underneath. Or so we thought.

The black was really retaining it's opacity well but as you can see, the white was non-existent throughout even though it was printed onto the transfer sheet

Now we'd found ourselves in a bit of a pickle. We had all of the Bags, and the event was right around the corner, it was too late to give up.

We were curious. But we were also out of white Vinyl… There were a few other colors but for some reason we chose red. Conceptually the fix made sense; place a sheet of vinyl within the bounds of the DTF Transfer sheet, et voila, we have a successful cover up. But realistically, it made no sense… Why was the red vinyl not showing up, but a poorly printed black under print was transparent from it being printed onto film to it being transferred to the bag. This made no sense, because realistically, shouldn't the red have shown through the white parts of the transfer, if black did in the first place?

We made some calls to our suppliers, secured the white vinyl we needed and cut each square to fit withing the transfer, which allowed for a successful result and an overdo sigh of relief