hoodies everywhere! 7k pieces in the shop

[screenprintguy]

Nice fleece order brother! I love a big Hoodie order.

[Croft]

put some goggly eye on your platens and it will look like the cookie monster 

like this?

pierre

awesome

[blue moon]

On large fleece jobs we position a "web spray technician" between loader and unloader.
It's an enviable position. Moreso than loader anyways, that much fleece gets tiring by the end
of the day.

More and more we're running the fashionable fleece that doesn't always require web tac.
Particularly with wb inks. Can't argue with that.

This! We have a third person spraying with web tack after every hoodie. The build up is about quarter of an inch right now and we are about 2/3 of the way through the order and have used about 20 cans so far. 'might have to repaper tomorrow.

We covered the bottom of the screens with cleanup cards so we don't bust the mesh on the zippers. I thought we'd split or notch the squeegees, but the press op said it was causing issues with the deposit so we tried the cleanup cards and so far so good!

Pierre

[ericheartsu]

We covered the bottom of the screens with cleanup cards so we don't bust the mesh on the zippers. I thought we'd split or notch the squeegees, but the press op said it was causing issues with the deposit so we tried the cleanup cards and so far so good!

Pierre

can you post a picture of this? I'm interested to see how it works

[tonypep]

As Pierre is finding out, an order like this is more about logistics than printing. The printing becomes the easy part rather quickly. In ATL we took on a 40K hoodie order w/ 40K mesh shorts to boot. Its all about what you do, when you do it, and how to organize on both the front and back side. When tight for space a request to partial ship is an excellent consideration however you may have to spread that across size scale. Also consider where to put empty boxes. I have had to rent trailers from time to time.

[Denis Kolar]

Wow!!!
You guys are busyyyyyyyyy

Keep 'em rolling

[ABuffington]

Took on a huge cut piece order of fleece one time in my first shop, all cut piece.  After emptying the second truck of cut fleece in huge plastic bags we realized it all wouldn't fit in the shop.  Piled to the ceiling we could not get the last 20 bags in. My neighbors hated me.  I had beg to store some in their shop just so we could print.  Pee Wee Herman Sweats as well, but hey they paid well.

We multi layered pallet paper and liked 3M-77 adhesive to prevent web spray from lifting off on the fabric.  It lasted several rounds before needing to be sprayed again.  Nice order Pierre, you will find royal blue dust bunnies for months to come.

Al

[3Deep]

We've had large orders that has taken over the shop with boxes never thought about renting a trailer to store for a bit, but I just hate you fella's that get those big order's LOL.  I don't think we could handle a 7k pc order in 5 days and I wouldn't think about taken a 40k order unless I had one of you guys contract print it for us.

[tonypep]

Its a common mistake to under-estimate the handling on large orders. And you can often count on the customer/supplier to screw things up for you. On more than one occaision product has arrived with mixed product within the pallets. Someone has to sort all that out. Or Mizuno, when I contracted for them, would not only do this, but blanks individual folded/bagged and pinned with tissue in the middle. On 20K plus orders! And, you had to use all new boxes which they never failed to under deliver and when they would they would be late

[Itsa Little CrOoked]

We just printed a 2,000 pc 2-color front and 1-color back, our largest single design run to date, and the labor and space requirements for staging did surprise me. It happened to be a LARGE(!) waterbased print on the fronts, and just keeping the ink supplied took more time than I'd figured.

(Waterbased printing seems to consume more ink, but I didn't really realize that, since we only printed manually up until last year.)

I can't imagine doing 7K hoodies--space wise--much less 40K! They are so bulky!

[jvanick]

35k hoodies in our shop...

Logistically it almost became a disaster... but we powered through, learned a bunch and would do it again in a heartbeat.

these all were customer ordered from china, and arrived NOT palletized in a shipping container...

upon opening the boxes we found that the shirts were all individually folded and bagged... this started a massive effort requiring 2 people to unbag shirts and stack them on job carts.

We thought all was good for the first few days -- we were averaging 550 shirts/hr 3600 shirts/day. Then we get a calll from the customer telling us to "Stop the presses" as all the shirts were the wrong size (they ordered them, so not our responsibility) -- their vendor in china evidently mixed up the womens and youth size tempates, so all the womens shirts were SO tiny that a 2xl womens fit like a small. So we start only printing the mens shirts as they scrambled to get more in.

We had 5 people working on the job (2 unbagging, loader, catcher, and a puller/stacker at the end of the belt). It actually didn't go that bad overall... just that the shop was so stacked that we had little 2' walkways to get around the first week.

Total production time was around 100 hours (that includes setups, teardowns, switchovers, inking/gluing etc). We were lucky in that the fleece material stuck really well to waterbase tack and we didn't have to use webspray.

I'm sure I'm forgetting some parts of this, but it was quite the job for our little 1 auto shop (while keeping all the other orders flowing) <<- this is what a lot of people don't think about... thank god for our 10 color press so we were able to put other jobs 'in between' the heads to keep the big job setup.

[blue moon]

We've had large orders that has taken over the shop with boxes never thought about renting a trailer to store for a bit, but I just hate you fella's that get those big order's LOL.  I don't think we could handle a 7k pc order in 5 days and I wouldn't think about taken a 40k order unless I had one of you guys contract print it for us.

hey Darryl,
front and back make it 14K prints. The pisser is once they are done on the front they can't go back in the boxes which makes it more difficult. . .
Eric, attached is a picture of the cards on the back of the screen.

pierre

[ericheartsu]

Thanks Pierre!
that's so smart! that's why i love these boards!!

[tonypep]

When I was a much younger pup we had a 3 million piece run for Newport cigs. I couldn't get off the forklift...........loading and unloading pallets all day for a month. Good times.

[dirkdiggler]

When I was younger we had a 2 million piece order for a little public speaker from Chicago named Barrack Obama!  Almost killed me, we lost a lot of good men that year!  But I did it!