Chapter 3
- Part 2-

Decorated Apparel Industry Growth by Revenue Channels
(in Billion $)

Printed garments account for more than half of decorated garments, and most are still screen-printed. Direct-to-garment inkjet printing accounted for less than 1%, because it is still a new technology that has yet to penetrate most garment decoration production plants. A market research firm, I.T. Strategies, is projecting the world-wide revenue of textile materials printed by direct-to-garment digital printers to grow to $12.8 billion by 2010. If it materializes, the share of direct-to-garment printing will increase from less than 1% in 2006 to about 10% by 2010.  As we have discussed, there are a number of advantages to digital printing.  It is simply a matter of time and availability of a wider range of products before digital apparel printers achieve a higher rate of adoption. Meanwhile, digital apparel printing is establishing itself as the preferred method for short run decoration, particularly for promotional apparel.

Although most garment printing is done by screen-printing for now, the screen printers are busy adopting direct-to-garment printing. According to the SGIA 2008 survey, garment decorators planned to spend half of their digital output device purchasing budget on direct-to-garment printers, compared to all other types of digital output devices.10  The survey shows that other types of digital methods, such as inkjet transfer, dye sublimation and laser transfer, are in decline. These older "heat applied graphics" require expensive materials and are labor-intensive, resulting in higher operating costs. 

The adoption of direct-to-garment printers will accelerate as higher throughput printers are introduced. I.T. Strategies predicts that the direct-to-garment printer world-wide installed base will increase to over 50,000 printers by year 2010 from a moderate beginning just a few years ago.11  We are yet to see if this will materialize, but we have no doubt a significant part of garment decoration will shift from screen printing to direct-to-garment digital printing in the coming years. A similar development took place in the wide-format inkjet graphics printing market.  The installed base of wide-format inkjet printers replacing screen printing grew from under 3,000 units in 1994 to over 60,000 units in just five years, a twenty-fold increase. We believe a similar development is in the offing for direct-to-garment printers. 

Since garment decoration is a relatively simple business that does not require a large physical space or many employees, nearly a quarter of all garment decoration businesses are run part-time. Besides, approximately 36% of all full-time owners run their businesses from home. As their businesses grow, an increasing number of owners are progressing from part-time to full-time while home-based businesses are shifting to commercial or industrial space.

The 2007 industry survey shows that a typical full-time screen printing garment decorator had an average of $1.3 million revenue in 2006, compared to an average of $470,000 for a full-time embroidery business.8 This may indicate that embroidery shops are generally smaller businesses than screen printers - or it may indicate a changing trend in favor of screen printed garments over embroidered garments. Since less than 1% of all garment decoration utilizes digital inkjet printers at present, there are still too few of them from which we can derive comparable statistics for digital garment printers. At present, we do not have any statistics that apply to part-timers.

While the above division of the decorated garment industry is based on the production methods, we would like to consider a different perspective. We will classify the decorated garment market into three groups based on perceived customer needs. We have not yet seen anyone classify the market in this manner, but it will serve a useful purpose as you plan your marketing strategy.

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