Heat Transfer Vinyl

This isn’t a Tshirt printing process, stricly speaking, as there’s no printing involved, but it’s a very commonly used garment decoration process. 

Very frequently used for lettering and numbers for sports tops, heat transfer vinyl is great for single colour designs, names and/or numbers on the backs of shirts, and other simple single colour designs.

All you need in order to decorate Tshirts and other garments with vinyl, is sheets or rolls of different colored heat transfer vinyl, a heat transfer press, and and a contour cutter.

Pros of Heat Transfer Vinyl

• Inexpensive setup.
• Cost effective process for single colour designs in small volumes.
• Simple process.

Inexpensive setup.

All you need for heat transfer vinyl, is a flat heat press (and you don’t need anything in particular, just go for the best, most reliable brand your budget allows for), a contour cutter, and, of course, heat transfer vinyl either on the roll or in sheets.

Cost Effective Process for Small Volumes

Tshirt vinyl is relatively inexpensive, so when it comes to single colour names, numbers and simple designs, this is a fairly cost effective process when compared to laser transfer printing and inkjet transfer printing. 

This is only the case, though, when we’re discussing small volumes. For larger volume, other processes, particularly screen printing, would produce similar results at a lower cost.

Simple Process.

There’s really not a great deal to garment decoration with heat transfer vinyl. You contour cut your design, weed it out, and then heat press it on to the Tshirt, hoody, or whatever garment you’re decorating.

Note that I said it’s simple, not easy… How easy it is, depends on the complexity of the design, and how many colours. If you’re trying to create a multi coloured design with lots of detail, then this is going to be fiddly and time consuming to weed out, fiddly to lay up and press, and the whole thing will be a lot more time consuming compared to achieving the same result with another process. 

However, when working with single colour simple designs, text, and numbers – heat transfer vinyl is a really simple, straight forward and easy process.

What kind of Tshirt printing businesses use Heat Transfer Vinyl?

This method is really best suited to personalization printing. It’s not a process that lends itself particularly well to printing in larger volumes, due to the labor involved in this process, which becomes considerably more with larger volumes, than with other processes including screen printing and DTG.