The Tour de France Races on as Fans Demand Custom Apparel Just as Quickly
As the Tour de France continues towards its finale on July 24th, it’s expected that 3.5 billion viewers will tune in to catch at least one stage of the race. Top contenders have many devout fans who show their support, whether backing Tadej Pogacar on his try for a third straight win or rivals like Primoz Roglic or Jonas Vingegaard.
The tide of the race changes from day to day, with new fan favorites emerging at a rapid pace. Those fans often show their allegiance with polyester fan apparel with the colors and designs of their favorites, often customized with the fans’ own names. However, keeping up with that pace is a major challenge for many clothing suppliers.
These modern demands are felt most intensely across a wide range of sports fan apparel. After an athlete sets a new record or a team wins a major championship, there’s an influx in demand for both related and unrelated sports apparel. As certain sports rise and fall in relative popularity extremely rapidly, designers need a solution that lets them react just as quickly.
The Prevalence of Sports Fan Apparel
Sports fans love to show their pride in their favorite athletes and teams. They do so through both branded and unbranded sports apparel. In general, this comes down to jerseys and other apparel directly related to athletic endeavors.
These types of apparel are made from polyester, a fantastic material that has many notable benefits. However, traditional printing methods have made polyester designs a major challenge for designers. The technologies used are expensive, slow, and inefficient for small-scale production.
In the rapidly shifting marketplace of sports fan apparel, these restrictions make it difficult for designers to fully capitalize on trends as they’re happening. Reacting to these trends requires garments ready tomorrow, not a month from now. Where traditional methods fall short, Kornit provides a solution for these designers.
Polyester Garment Printing Made More Versatile Than Ever
The Atlas MAX Poly is the latest direct-to-garment printer from Kornit. This innovative piece of technology provides many of the same benefits as our other printers – speed, scalability, quality, and affordability. However, it brings these benefits to the challenging field of polyester apparel, while also remaining compatible with multiple other fabric types, and polyester blends.
This new printer provides a viable alternative to heat transfer vinyl, screen printing, and sublimation for apparel producers at any scale. Now, designers can become truly reactive with their product lines, taking advantage of trends as they happen instead of after the fact.
With on-demand printing, athletes and fans can be provided with an extensive range of customization options. Custom names, numbers, logos, and designs can all be implemented without any disruption to workflows. Finally, small-scale and even one-off polyester garment printing is available through a cost-effective method.
The ease of use of the Atlas MAX Poly further lends its effectiveness to manufacturers at any scale. It uses a simple one-step process with no pretreatment. That means your Atlas MAX Poly can be run by a single operator, producing up to 90 garments per hour for a low and consistent cost per print, and optimal total cost of ownership.
Licensors and textile printers and can streamline the entire web-to-print process by using Kornit’s end-to-end workflow solution KornitX with their Atlas MAX Poly. Furthermore, they can gain sustainable, on-demand digital efficiency and quality y by tapping into the KornitX Global Fulfiller Network, leveraging Kornit’s growing global install base to ensure fast, low-cost, localized fulfillment nearest the end consumer, bypassing supply chain challenges and complex multinational logistics for a superior production and consumer experience. This business model is proven to address the needs of creators of all kinds, including apparel, brands, providers of licensed merchandise, home-based do-it-yourselfers, and others.
These advantages come down to enabling textile service providers at any scale with the flexibility and agility they need to compete with major brands that use more expensive solutions. This new printer gives designers everything they need to succeed in the rapidly changing sports fan apparel market.
Exceptional Polyester Printing Quality
The Atlas MAX Poly is affordable, flexible, sustainable, and easy to use. However, that doesn’t mean you’re compromising on quality with your designs. The Atlas MAX Poly delivers exceptional results across a wide range of criteria, enabling more designs on more fabrics than ever before.
The prints from the Atlas MAX Poly mitigate a variety of common issues like dye migration and “ghosting.” Not only that, but printed designs are long-lasting, standing up to the rough treatment and frequent wash cycles that sports fan apparel faces.
The robust color versatility of the Atlas MAX Poly is truly unparalleled. Pantone color-matching provides true-to-design prints, and the available pallet is further expanded with Kornit’s unique neon color selection. These designs can be applied to both light and dark polyester, as well as brushed polyester, a challenge most other methods can’t handle.
Kornit XDi implementation even allows for 3D textures, making names, numbers, and logos pop and replicating the feel of vinyl transfers on professional jerseys. No other printer delivers such an extensive range of design options. Even photo-realistic printing can be achieved with the Atlas MAX Poly.
With Kornit, teams sports, athletes and fans don’t have to compromise. They can go to their customers with the designs they really want, taking advantage of trends as they happen instead of weeks or months later.
