5th Avenue Clothing adds digital

Dominic Bernard Friday, June 2, 2023

Leicester-based garment printer 5th Avenue Clothing has entered the digital printing arena with a Brother GTX 600.

Installed in March, the new dye-sub printer now sits alongside 5th Avenue's two MHM SP5000 and two MHM X-Type Plus screen printing presses.

Representing around 5% of the business’ annual output of four million units, the new technology has been well received at the firm, but has plenty of room to expand, according to Suhel Ahmed, 5th Avenue's site manager.

He told Printweek: "It's really good. We just need to push that digital side of the business.

"We are getting dribs and drabs of orders, but as our main core is screen printing, the customers we work for tend to require thousands, not tens of pieces. We definitely want to expand our digital side, and we have it set up nicely for production."

The team looked at several other machines, but, having seen the GTX in operation at Birmingham's The Print Show and then on-site at another manufacturer, it decided to go for the Brother.

"It's very user friendly," Ahmed added.

Before the Brother's arrival, 5th Avenue also invested in a Beck Packautomaten Multiplex Pico, a compact packing machine, in January.

The packer has had a "phenomenal" impact, Ahmed said.

Reel-fed, and with speeds of up to 60 cycles per minute, the packer has breezed through work that had previously bottlenecked the packing stage.

"We were bagging each item individually, one by one; this machine does thousands an hour," Ahmed said.

It used to take three to four hours to pack a thousand items by hand; now, the Beck packs that number in an hour. Its use of a reel of film has likewise proved more economical than using individual bags.

Customer lead time has been reduced, Ahmed added, from two weeks to 10 days, and the machine has already packed over 800,000 items.

5th Avenue employs 60 at its site in Leicester.