Ludhiana's Addonz masters the art of colours on cloth

Two brothers Abhishek Soni and Hitesh Mehra armed with Bachelor of Technology degrees in textiles belonged with jewellery business, joined hands for a collective venture into garment printing and established Addonz, which added a Grafica DTG screen printing kit to multiply its production capabilities.

02 Jun 2017 | By Shripad Bhat

What had started off as a small manual table printing unit with a capacity to print about 300 t-shirts per day has transformed into a full-fledged DTG screen printing facility with the capacity to print around 8,500 t-shirts per day at its 15,750sq/ft production unit located in Ludhiana.

This production unit comprises of a range of machinery for garment printing, embroidery printing, digital printing for the process of sublimation and a heat transfer printing set-up.

Today, Abhishek Soni and Hitesh Mehra are proud of the fact that they can produce 8500 t-shirts daily.

They said, “We undertake multi-colour garment printing jobs of up to up to eight to ten colours. We have a facility to print a fabric of size 66x140-cms About 60% of our jobs involve multi-colour printing. We have a design team to create designs according to the choice of the customers although some of the customers send their own designs. We print all types of jobs – spot colour, CMYK and high density. About 30% of our customers are catering to the export market and rest provide services to the domestic market.”

Soni and Mehra said garment decoration (both printing and embroidery) has no limitation in creativity. Today, 60 to 70% of the total number of jobs involves digital print on different types of fabric other than cotton. When it comes to printing on cotton, Addonz opts for screen printing.

They made an important point when they said, “In Europe and many other countries garment printers learn first and then get into business. In India, in the absence of any established training facility, we foray into garments with a bit of knowledge, and then learnt on the job year after year, job after job.”

They added, “We use internationally approved inks and chemicals that are compliant with GOTS (Global Organic Textile Standards) and REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals). The quality aspect gets personally monitored by the two of us. We do not depend on our shopfloor staff. Since we have a complete control on the quality checks at various stages of printing, design, pre-press and screen making it has resulted in our rejections being not more than 0.5%.”
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