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Enhance a Colour produces custom, short run carpets
By LaShell Stratton
Enhance a Colour’s lobby features a 23 x 56 foot carpeted map of the United States.
The carpet was reproduced as six 23 x 10 foot panels.
Enhance a Colour’s list of clients sounds like a Hollywood roster. “A customer wanted me to do a carpet for J.Lo’s clothing line in his store once,” says Jim O’Connor, co-owner of the Danbury, Conn., signage and textile printer. “And I did one in 48 hours for Eminem’s movie premiere. They wanted it on a boat, and they wanted the print large enough so that you could see the website overhead.”
Broadway premieres. Banners for Tiffany’s and Federated Department Stores Inc. —Enhance a Colour has served them all. But for many years, the one thing the $5 million company could not do was print durable, short run orders of large carpets that could be used everywhere from trade shows to store lobbies.
“About three years ago we had a client who wanted 10 x 10 foot carpets to go throughout their store in different sections,” he says. “They sent an RFQ but we turned it down because at the time, the technology just wasn’t there.”
“Manufacturers have tried to solve this problem for years,” says Kevin O’Connor, also co-owner of Enhance a Colour. “Previously, the minimum order quantity for quality custom carpeting was 1,000 to 1,200 square yards. For many small businesses, this is an excessive quantity that results in high costs and significant waste.”
Jim says that part of the problem was the available manufacturing processes. Traditionally, printing a 10 x 10 foot carpet meant adhering solvent inks to just the top layer of the carpet fibers. “The solvent inks don’t last over time when you do it this way,” Jim says. “It’s like you bought a cheap knock-off T-shirt at a concert. You throw it in the washer and after a short time you see the ink wear off.” The same happens with the carpets. Treading, washing or vacuuming greatly reduces the print quality. “It will probably last you one trade show,” Jim continues. “For a company that’s doing 10 trade shows a year, that gets pretty expensive.”
For a more durable and cost effective solution, Enhance a Colour uses dye sublimation, a method used by many apparel and fabric banner manufacturers.
First, the client’s design is digitally printed with the help of EFI’s 3-meter VUTek FabriVu super-wide printer on heat transfer material. Then, using a heat press that Jim says was specifically designed for his company, the inks are applied to a carpet at 400 F. At that temperature, the inks are gaseous and become embedded in the fibers of the carpet. “This works only with poly fibers, not cotton,” Jim explains. The final product can be cleaned and walked on without compromising the print quality.
Using dye sublimation to print on mats and carpets is not rare. But Jim says as far as he knows, no one uses dye sublimation to print carpets as large as Enhance a Colour’s. “Before this, the biggest I heard about was 72 inches. I knew if we wanted to really be competitive we had to go to 120 inches,” he says.
Now Enhance a Colour can print-on-demand, long-lasting carpets of three different grades for clients that go to 10 feet in width and 100 feet in length. “The customers send us a printable PDF,” Jim explains. “It can be uploaded through our FTP site or they can burn the larger files to a DVD and mail it to us. We installed two T1 lines for the FTP site but some graphic artists may have problems sending the files through their computers.”
The company also offers fast turnaround. “We like to have two weeks for a job, but we have done it as fast as 48 hours.”
Jim says the company’s clients, which include event marketing companies, distributors and architects, are happy to harness Enhance a Colour’s new capabilities. One of those customers is SoBe Beverages. Enhance a Colour produced several 10 x 4 foot carpets for the beverage company’s appearance at a recent trade show.
And though carpet sales for the printer had never been strong in the past, “This year, I expect to bring in $400,000 to $700,000,” Jim says.
LaShell Stratton is assistant editor at Print Solutions magazine. Email comments to lstratton@PSDA.org.