Big Picture - November/December 2018 - 22

INTERIOR DÉCOR & TEXTILES

BIG PICTURE

November/December 2018

F A B R I C D E S I G N B Y M A R Y C AT H E R I N E F O L M A R , C O T T O N & Q U I L L . C H A I R F A B R I C D E S I G N B Y K I M B E R LY M C D O N A L D .

BRIDGING

THE

GAP

If you want something done right, do it yourself. As a brand
manager/designer at a soft home fashions supplier, Dee
Dee Davis became frustrated with the challenges of
outsourcing the printed fabrics she needed - so in 2012 she
decided to open her own digital textile printing company,
Décor Print (decor-print.com).
"For a couple of years (before starting Décor Print), I
was outsourcing thousands of yards of fabric to printers
across the country," Davis says. "I was overwhelming
them with what I had to print." In the interior design
world, color is king. She says the "extreme color matching" required for interior décor made outsourcing to other
PSPs even more of a sticky situation. Plus, there just
weren't very many textile printers that she could rely on
for her required speed and quality. Davis wanted to retain
color control, hit her deadlines, and have the supply she
needed, so she bought a printer and launched Décor Print
as a side business.
With her reactive dye process print experience, a
degree in textiles technology, and more than 20 years
in the corporate textile industry - including a decade
working at another home décor company that did
in-house printing - Davis figured she would be set. "I
thought I knew what I was doing, but there was a big
learning curve. Lots has changed since the last time I
was printing fabric," she adds.
After six years in business in Fort Mill, South Carolina,
Décor Print has grown to include four employees, in
addition to Davis. The shop relies on pigment, latex, and
dye sublimation processes on a total of five presses
including Mutoh ValueJet 1938TX, Epson SureColor
F7070, and HP Latex 365.
In addition to printing all the fabrics for Davis' home
fashions employer, Décor Print supplies custom textiles
for interior designers. She uses fabrics primarily from
PremEx and Jacquard Products, plus some from Top
Value Fabrics and Fisher Textiles. Material printed by
Décor Print ends up as decorative pillows, quilts,
upholstered furniture, drapery, bedding, and occasionally
clothing. Davis says they've also worked with artists who
want their work scanned and repeated for use on continuous yardage of material.
With the emphasis on perfectly matched color in
interiors, Davis says it's important to have "color vision."
She sometimes spends hours matching colors for a project.
"There are so many types of fabric - you have an optic
white or a white that isn't bleached, and all those colors
look different on each substrate," she adds.
Davis says she sees a growing attentiveness to wallpaper
printing in her custom market. "There's a lot of interest in
latex printing on fabric, which I think could be really huge
because there are so many latex machines already installed
at a lot of signage companies. I can see those companies
trying to capture some of that revenue stream."

http://www.decor-print.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Big Picture - November/December 2018