High Volume Direct to Garment Printing

Is the Kornit Breeze Direct to Garment Printer worth $110K or is it the Best Direct to Garment Printer for the Money?

 

The Kornit Breeze if the entry level direct to garment printer for that company. The Kornit Storm, the Kornit Avalanche are even higher production, higher end printers.. and frankly they are amazing machines. During a trip through the SGIA show a few months ago I got the chance to drool over Kornit’s line up and it started me thinking.

For those of you who are new to the direct to garment printing business, or have been away from it for a while or just spend 100% of your time making and washing out screens for your screen print shop (J) Kornit is a premium player in the market. If you order a 1 off custom shirt from a LOT of the big names in the online custom tee business, there’s a good chance it was made on a Kornit (pronounced “corneet”).

The Breeze is actually at the low end of these workhorses and can be had for the low low price of – let’s just say somewhere in the $80ks. But the bundle number, because you’re going to need that big air dryer they put with it, is really around $110,000.  The Kornit Breeze is also a lot less expensive than they’re other direct to garment machines.

So the question posed in the sub title is:

Is the Kornit Breeze WORTH it?

That completely depends on you and your business. If you are running a 24/7 operation and using it to its full capacity of about 40 light colored shirts an hour or 25 darks, then you’re probably not reading this article because you’re too busy printing shirts. But if you are, then there are things about the Breeze you’re going to want to take advantage of:

• Training – it’s not cheap, but Kornit will send people to your shop to set up the machine, spend a week tweaking it to just what your business requires. They’ll literally hold your hand through the start up.
• 3 Shift operations – no machine is perfect, and no company is perfect, but Kornit has the reputation for minimum downtime. That minimum downtime is vital if you’re running that kind of business.
• Workflow and ecommerce tools – once again, are you in that large – single shirt order direct to garment online ecommerce order space? Spend some time looking at Kornit’s productivity tools and you’ll be impressed.

BUT.. how many of us are there? How many businesses actually have the capacity to spend that $110K and the volume to keep that direct to garment printer fed?

Kornit Breeze Comparison to M2 Direct to Garment Printer

All of the readers here know how much I like the M2 and the whole DTG brand direct to garment printer line up, sold in the US by ColDesi.com. The comparison between the DTG M2 and the Kornit Breeze might seem like a stretch perpetrated by a fan, but bear with me because there are some numbers to look at:

Cost of the Kornit Breeze with Dryer, etc: about $110,000

Production Speed: 25 light garments, 40 dark garments – so an “average” of 32.5 per hour This includes drying, etc.

 

Cost of an M2 with 2 Heat Presses: about $25,000

Production Speed even with having to pre treat separately (the Kornit has a built in pretreater): an average of light and dark garments = about 16 shirts per hour from prepress to finished shirts.

That would seem like a clear difference and easy disqualifier until you find out that, very quietly, the people at DTG Digital who make the M2 have worked out a network cable interface , and the RIP Pro C6 software can handle sending graphics to more than one machine, one right after the other.

Now TWO M2 Direct to Garment Printers and 4 heat presses cost: $50,000 (it’s less, but this is good for our purposes)

So you’re $110K Kornit Breeze can produce that average of about 32.5 shirts per hour and your $5K M2 networked or USB’d together can produce 32 shirts per hour.

And you can add another M2 and 2 heat presses and get to 48 shirts/hour for $75K, and ANOTHER M2 to get to 64 shirts/hour for $100K.

Which is the Best DTG Printer set up?

There’s another advantage to the kind of multi-head printer set up with the M2s – one day, even with the Kornit Breeze, you WILL have an issue. The machine will go down, get hit by lightning, someone spills ink into the guts of it.. something will happen. When it does, your shop is closed!

With this multi-head networked DTG Printer set up if that happens you’re still 75% IN BUSINESS.

AND if your business grows even more you can just add another M2 into the mix for that $25K or less and increase your output by 16 or more shirts an hour – with the Kornit and machines like it you are basically upgrading your outut $100K at a time!

In Conclusion

So is the Kornit Breeze worth the $110K? It’s a great machine. It’s a capable machine. And there’s a lot of good things said about the company. And maybe if you’re running that 24/7 shop and want that level of product and support it IS the best dtg printer for you.

That’s not me or most of you – and I think there’s a compelling alternative here with the networked DTG M2 printers.

Find out more about Kornit at http://www.kornit.com/#oht:lang=en-us

Read about the M2 Direct to garment printer at: http://www.coldesi.com