The Screen Print Man

The printers have been instrumental to help these brands reach out to their audiences. One such printer is Kolkata-based S K Enterprise, which is spear headed by the Khan brothers.

The Khan brothers produce photo-realistic heat transfer jute bags in single, two and three colours. Founded in 1949, the Khan Group has been thickly engaged in jute bag printing, mainly for sacks for tea, sugar, and rice packaging. They have now undertaken multi-colour and photo-realistic printing on jute and cloth bags.

Out of their total production, shopping bags comprise 80% and the balance are promotional bags which are supplied to large industrial houses, MNCs, telecom majors, garment exporters, and to shopping malls, for branding purpose.

“We had executed 8.20 lakh bags of single design exclusively for the European market,” says Sagir Khan, head of S K Enterprise.

The numbers get larger. The Khan Group runs three production units which rolls out 7000 multi-coloured screen printed bags. S K Enterprise is a flagship of among six companies run by the Khan Group. But all this didn’t come easy to the Group.

Sagir Khan and his brother Nawab function in a large set up of manual screen printing. However, now they have shifted operations to automation. “Our corporate customers were firmly demanding to reproduce photo realistic images directly on jute bags based on the digital proof submitted to us. It sounded impossible,” explained Sagir Khan.

“The only solution was to go for heat transfer printing. Although we have huge manual screen printing set up, we realised that to produce photo-realistic or 10-15 spot colour heat transfers, automation was the only way.”

The brothers invested in a nano-premier package comprising nano print plus, nano-screen maker 5-in-1, nano Texdryer, and nano-sharpener. “Automation is paying us rich dividend with marked improvement in production and quality. We have repeat orders from most of our customers. Moreover, based on this success, we have also diversified into heat transfers for garment industry, especially for kids-wear,” said Sagir.

While S K Enterprise and others produce their jobs, we are preparing for the Screen Print India exhibition slated for 18 to 21 September.