Other Services
Digital Printing and DTG for Garments
Digital printing puts your design onto the garment straight from the file, with no screens, no separations and no setup to pay for. That single fact changes what is possible: a run of ten costs what a run of ten should cost, a reprint takes as long as a print, and a design with two hundred colours costs the same as one with two.
We print digitally at our Leicester site alongside screen, hybrid, transfer and sublimation printing, so the method gets chosen on what suits the job. There is no minimum order on digital work.
Direct to Garment (DTG)
Direct to garment, or DTG, is inkjet printing onto fabric. The garment is loaded onto the press and the design is printed directly onto it from the file, in the same way a desktop printer puts ink onto paper, using inks formulated to bond with textile fibres. It is the most direct route from a design to a printed garment that exists.
Unlimited Colours at No Extra Cost
Screen printing charges by the colour, because every colour is another screen and another setup. Digital does not care. A full-colour photograph, a design with a hundred shades in a gradient and a two-colour logo all cost the same to print. If your artwork is complex, this is usually the cheapest way to get it onto a garment at low volume.
No Minimum Order
One piece is a viable order. That makes digital the method for samples, prototypes, staff and personal orders, single-item customisation, and testing a design in the market before committing money to a production run. Our Print On Demand® service is built on this, producing units only as they are ordered.
Fast Turnaround and Easy Reprints
There are no screens to make, so there is nothing standing between an approved file and a printed garment. A reprint months later needs no setup either, because the file is the setup. Standard production turnaround is 5 to 10 working days from approval of artwork and payment.
Photographic Detail and Fine Gradients
Continuous tone, soft fades and photographic images print as they appear in the file, without being converted into halftone dots. For artwork built around subtle blending, digital is the honest choice.
A Soft Print You Cannot Feel
The ink sits in the fabric rather than as a thick layer on top of it, so a digital print is soft to the touch and breathable. On a light garment it is barely detectable under the hand.
Where Digital Printing Has Limits
Worth being straight about. On dark garments, digital needs a white underbase to stop the colours sinking into the fabric, which adds a step and affects the hand feel. It cannot produce the specialty finishes that screen printing can, so puff, metallic and foil are out. And as quantities climb, the cost per unit stops falling the way screen printing’s does, because every garment takes the same time as the last one.
That is why we run more than one press. Past a certain quantity, screen printing is cheaper and gives a heavier, more opaque print. For detailed full-colour artwork at volume on any garment colour, hybrid printing combines a screen-printed underbase with digital detail on top. Send us the design, the garment and the quantity and we will tell you which of the three the job wants.
Water-Based Inks and Sustainable Printing
Our digital printing uses water-based inks that are non-toxic and safe for aquatic life. That is not a small detail in this industry. Textile printing has a long history of putting things into water that should not be there, and using water-based ink removes a large part of that at source.
The wider position is documented rather than asserted. Our Leicester operation holds SEDEX SMETA 4-Pillar certification including the SMETA 7 additions from January 2025, covering labour standards, health and safety, environment and business ethics, completed an Arche environmental audit in January 2025, and takes part in the Worldly Higg Index environmental assessment, most recently in December 2024. The detail is on our sustainability and CSR page.
Digital also removes waste that other methods generate. There are no screens to coat, expose and reclaim, no film, and no ink mixed for a job and then thrown away. Printing on demand rather than to a forecast means fewer garments made that nobody buys, which is the largest single piece of waste in apparel.
Garments and Artwork for Digital Printing
Digital works best on cotton and cotton-rich fabric. If your garment is polyester, sublimation printing is usually the better method, and if it is a technical blend, tell us the composition before you commit so we can check how it will take ink.
Send the highest resolution artwork you have, at or near print size. Because digital prints exactly what is in the file, the quality of the file sets the quality of the result more directly than with any other method. If the artwork needs building, redrawing or preparing, our apparel graphic design team can do that first.
From One Piece to a Full Range
Digital scales down further than any other method and connects to everything else we do. A single sample can be printed to check a design before it goes to screen printing for the production run. A full range can be printed on demand through Print On Demand® with no stock held at all. Finished garments go through the same garment finishing line, pressed, folded, tagged, labelled and bagged to retail standard, and can be held here through stock inventory management or shipped to your customers through dropshipping and fulfilment.
Who Uses Our Digital Printing
New brands testing designs before buying stock. Established brands running a long tail of low-volume lines. Businesses ordering small batches of workwear and staff apparel. Charities, clubs and campaign groups with modest quantities. Anyone who needs a sample, a prototype or a one-off done properly. And bands and promoters printing small variant runs alongside our band and tour merch printing.
Digital Printing FAQs
Get a Digital Printing Quote
Send the artwork, the garment and the quantity, even if it is one piece, and we will come back with a quote and a view on the best method for it. Call 0116 242 6300 or email info@meeshagroup.co.uk.