[VIDEO] Oz Custom Shirts revs up production with two Brother GTXpro garment printers

With two Brother GTXpro garment printers powering its workflow, Oz Custom Shirts continues to go from strength to strength utilising the power of both printers for both large volume print jobs and shorter, on-demand runs.

Oz Custom Shirts owner Joe Lorenzin chats to GJS about the history of the business and its future growth strategy to capture more of the local custom garment decoration market.

Transcript:

Hi, I'm Anika, my part in this business is that I do a lot of the printing side of things, whether it's DTG, DTF, or a bit of dye sublimation.

Hi, my name's Joe, I'm the co-founder of Oz Custom Shirts. I look after the artwork for DTG printing.

I'm Jen, I'm the one who looks after the administration side of work.

I did a lithographic apprenticeship and I learnt all about colours, and I've been a magazine printer for 30 years.

We started our own brand called Kool Carz, and then slowly were asked to print other shirts for other people, so that's how we became Oz Custom shirts.

We're located on the Central Coast at Tuggerah Business Park, providing professional garment services for businesses who want to show off their products, and show off who they are.

We do car clubs, we do motorbike groups, we do the average tradesman's shirts. We also print some shirts for people celebrating that big 50th birthday, or weddings or anything like that.

The printer technologies we use here are mainly DTG, but we do have a new technology called DTF, which has been a game-changer for us because we've been able to print on polyester-cotton mix, and have been able to print so many, that it's just opened up a whole new book of things that we can do.

I think Brother and all their products, especially their DTG printers and the GTX Pro or any of the GTX range are just absolutely wonderful, so versatile. It's a great machine, it's done 30,000 prints, and it's still running the same white ink head. It's just amazing in reliability.

GJS helped us succeed in many ways. The first person I spoke to was Michael at GJS, and he steered us in the right direction. He got us onto the Brother GT-3 that we bought from them and we also started off with a heat press and a pre-treat machine. Slowly we worked our way up and decided we needed to do some stickers, and so we bought a solvent cutter, and we've been upgrading our equipment all the time as our business grows.

GJS has always been behind us. When we moved into the warehouse, I had issues with software. They've got the helpline, you just get onto them and they remotely fix the computer. It's fixed up straight away as they know how important to keep your business going.

What's next for Oz Custom Shirts is that we may expand to another warehouse, so we can cover more of the Central Coast. We are at Tuggerah Business Park and we've also bought another warehouse in Gosford, and in the near future, we're looking at buying two Brother Bulks. So then the shaking-the-cartridge side of things is over so we don't have to come in every day and shake the cartridges. They're also a tougher machine that you can walk away from for a week or so and not be worried about the heads clogging up as they have automatic circulation heads.

The advice I'd give to someone if they were looking at purchasing a Brother printer or even any other sort of Brother product is to go for it.

• Highlights
• Design and print hundreds of customised products for customers: all in-house and on-demand
• Multiple DTG printers and accessories for high-production capacity and minimal down-time/redundancy
• Two Brother GTXpro Direct-to-Garment (DTG) printers
• Two Geo Knight DK20SP digital swinger heat transfer presses
• Schulze PRETREATmaker IV pre-treatment machine
• Schulze PRETREATmaker Basic pre-treatment machine
• SEFA Clam Pro clamshell heat transfer press