Almost anyone can print a fabric now. What does that mean for your business? Inside the design industry’s digital printing revolution.

It was not love at first sight. Like many people in the fabric business, when Stacy Waggoner first saw digitally printed textiles, she was skeptical. “My first job in New York was with Jack Lenor Larsen, and he was very intent that everyone on staff learn about every production method—I was a huge textile snob—and a lot of the early digital prints were, frankly, crap,” recalls Waggoner, now the owner of New York fabric showroom Studio Four NYC.

Though they represented impressive technical wizardry, the earliest digitally printed textiles to hit the design market did not inspire awe. The print mark was fuzzy. The hand was stiff. And while you could use digital printers to print anything, the creativity they inspired was not always so creative. “So much of it was just taking an antique textile, scanning it and hitting print,” says Waggoner. “It was like, That’s not how this should work.”

Then, around 2009, Waggoner saw something that changed her mind. An Australian studio called Edit had produced a digitally printed collection that repurposed photographs of vintage jewelry into a repeat. “You had hundreds of colors—something you could never do with a screen,” she says. “And for the first time, I thought, OK, this can actually be cool.”

Waggoner’s showroom began representing Edit, and soon, other digitally printed collections began trickling in. At the time, the balance was roughly 80/20, with screen-printed fabrics making up the large majority of the brand’s selection. Year by year, more digital began slipping into the mix. Now Studio Four carries at least as many digital prints as it does screen prints.

The same shift is playing out in the broader design industry. While reporting this article, I made a point of asking everyone the same question: If we were to walk through the D&D Building in New York today and count every printed SKU, what percentage would be digital? Most pegged it at around 50 percent, and all said the number was only going up.

“With a lot of new people coming into the business, digital printing is 60 to 70 percent of what they do,” says Scott Kravet, a principal of Kravet. “There are plenty of companies where it’s 100 percent digital.”

The rise of digitally printed textiles and wallpapers has come with a good deal of fanfare from evangelists. The technology, they say, is good for the environment, good for brands and good for designers and their clients. Are they right?

“Digital printing” sounds like one technical, highly specific thing, but it’s not. The term encompasses a variety of techniques, ranging from sublimation printing—in which a pattern is printed on a thin film, then bonded to a sheet of polyester—to the more familiar inkjet method. The common thread: A computer is directly translating a digital file into a physical print. Other textile printing techniques involve machinery of some kind, but only digital printing allows you to turn a JPEG into a pillowcase.

Though there are esoteric versions of the technology, a majority of fabrics and wallpapers printed for the design industry involve inkjet printing, a souped-up version of the process that has powered desktop printers since the 1980s. Odd but true: The same technology that spit out English homework in 1996 is now being used to create yardage for Michael S. Smith.

Despite how common inkjet printing has become, it’s worth examining just how complex the technology really is. Inkjet printers rely on a carriage of print heads that shuttle back and forth as paper or fabric passes underneath. Powered by pulses of heat or electricity, these heads eject droplets of ink measuring in picoliters—that’s one trillionth of a liter, invisible to the naked eye—onto the surface below.

Robertson Hartnett, the co-founder of Bantam, Connecticut–based digital printing studio Twenty2, described the miraculous physics involved with an analogy: “Imagine you’re on an airplane, and you need to drop an apple on a target on the ground below. You’re not going to hit it,” he said. “What these machines have to do is drop millions of apples in exactly the right place, every time.”

To take the analogy a step further, digitally printing wallpaper involves throwing millions of apples from the window of a plane onto a flat, simple surface—say, a parking lot. Digitally printing textiles involves doing the same but on a textured surface, like the canopy of a forest.

Making matters even more complicated, digital fabric and wallpaper printers are not built with the design industry in mind. Instead, the technology was largely built for commercial printers and apparel manufacturers, which use it to spin up ads, signage and bachelor party T-shirts. Home textiles, meanwhile, require long runs of continuous printing that push the equipment to its limits.

That may seem like an insignificant difference, but it’s not. Compare the needs of a residential wallpaper brand with any one of the trendy companies advertising on the New York subway system. Those brands need their ads to look beautiful, with vivid colors and rich saturation that make their products pop. Digital printers can do that easily. What those brands do not require is for all of their ads to be exactly the same hue, down to the pixel. If the image in the ads on the A train are a smidge darker than those on the 6 train, well, who cares? No one is experiencing them at the same time. Certainly, no one is holding them up side by side.

Small variations from print to print are normal. They are also a disaster for a wallpaper maker—even a 5 percent change in saturation would create a jarring “jump” from panel to panel. Even more challenging, design brands need to be able to perfectly match a memo, which could have been created years beforehand. The need for precision places a burden on digital printers that the machines are not always built to handle.

Given those challenges, it’s not surprising that it has taken years for digital printing to find a foothold in the design industry. But as manufacturers have finessed the process to work for fabric and wallpaper, the result has gotten more and more reliable. At the same time, manufacturers have improved the underlying technology by leaps and bounds.

Printheads that ejected droplets measuring 50 to 75 picoliters in the early 2000s can now paint in a tiny fraction of that. Machines that once produced stiff results from a small handful of possible grounds can now print on wispy linens and sturdy velvets alike, with dramatic improvements in durability and washability. Gone are the days of scratchy, fuzzily rendered digital prints.

“Many designers initially dismissed the technology as a subpar, low-quality alternative to traditional screen-printed fabrics,” says Anderson Somerselle, the New York–based owner of online multiline Somerselle and a former textile manager at the John Rosselli showroom. “That has definitely changed.”

Still, digital printing’s reputation has lagged a bit behind the technology. It’s telling that, while very few designers will fall out of love with a fabric just because it was printed digitally, brands don’t usually highlight digital printing the same way they might celebrate a more romantic production technique—hand-block printing, for example. “Typically what you’ll see is that brands will say ‘printed in America,’” one expert told me with a rueful laugh. “What they won’t say is how it was printed.”

Along with lack of prestige, digital printers have other limitations. A big one: They’re not great at printing light colors on a dark surface, though there is progress being made in that direction. (While “white ink” is a significant selling point for manufacturers of printing equipment, many fabric experts say the technology isn’t quite advanced enough to take the offering into the mainstream.) Digital printers also struggle with metallic inks, unique textures and printing on chunky grounds—we’re a ways off from a great digitally printed boucle.

But for more straightforward, dark-on-light patterns, digital printing has come a long way. Over the last few years, experts say the technology has gotten to the point that even fabric connoisseurs can’t always tell the difference between a textile that was digitally printed and one that was made by analog means.

“Clients used to flip samples over and say, ‘Oh, we know it’s digital because there’s no color on the back,’” says Paul Turnbull, the proprietor of Turnbull Design, a 142-year-old British company that produces fabrics and wallcoverings through a variety of printing methods, including digital. “But our knowledge and the technology itself has developed over the last 10 years. Top-end studios won’t play that game with us anymore. They’ll ask if it’s digital and we’ll say, ‘Well, you tell us.’”

There is one way that even an amateur can identify a digital print. If a contemporary pattern is full of colors—more than 10, say—odds are good that it was produced digitally. The reason is simple: It would be cost-prohibitive to make it any other way. That’s because analog printing methods involve the creation of screens that are used to apply the elements of a pattern. For every color, you need a unique screen, which typically costs somewhere in the range of $500 to $1,000 to produce. For monochromatic stripes, that’s not a huge expense. But a textile company launching a line of vibrant florals could easily spend tens of thousands of dollars before printing a single yard of fabric. Setting up a digital print isn’t free, exactly (more on that later), but it doesn’t come with the same fixed costs.

Yardage is another area where digital printing stands apart from analog methods. Because of the many steps (not to mention hard costs) required to set up a pattern for screen or rotary production, most studios require their customers to place a minimum order before even getting started. Those minimums have crept down over the decades, but in general, customers are required to buy several hundred yards of fabric or wallpaper to kick-start the process. Digital printing, by contrast, can be priced out one yard a time, with very low—or even no—minimum orders.

Though digital printing is often championed for its technical capabilities—unlimited colors! UV curing!—the biggest impact the technology has had on the design industry is how it changed the economics of production. Twenty years ago, launching even a boutique fabric line would have required some serious startup capital and a warehouse to store inventory. Now you can get going with a little bit of cash and a few emails.

As the barrier to entry has lowered, new players have entered the market. Though there is no official register of new boutique design brands, anecdotal evidence would suggest that we’re in the midst of a boom, with showrooms inundated with requests for representation. Much of the wave is powered by digital printing.

Elliston House is a case in point. Founded this year by partners Morgan Hood and Ally Holderness, the pair had been nursing the idea of a fabric and wallpaper line for years. Going digital was simply the most efficient way to go to market.   

“We would have done this, even without digital printing,” says Hood. “But we would have had to secure an outside investor and figure out a warehouse. As a new business with limited cash flow, I didn’t want to tie up our capital just holding inventory. And when you have an idea like this, you want to just get going.”

For Hood, whose entire collection of colorful traditional prints is printed in South Carolina, the appeals of digital production are self-explanatory. “The lead times are usually only five to seven days, it’s print-on-demand, the quality is good,” she says. “You can really see why this is such a huge thing in the industry now.”

Designers, too, are eagerly exploring what the technology means for them. The low minimums, quick turnaround times and limitless color options are catnip, says Providence–based textile designer Alex Conroy, who takes requests from her showrooms to work with interior designers on one-of-a-kind patterns. “Designers are always looking for something that you can’t get elsewhere, especially because clients have access to everything now with online shopping,” she says. “You can do that with this, and control the margin.”

Some are taking it a step further and using digital printing to launch or grow their own stand-alone collections. The pandemic’s disruption of normal supply chains may have pushed many to experiment with new options. “For a long time, designers would say, ‘I can’t do this,’” says Brooklyn- and Los Angeles–based textile designer Lisa Miller, who has also worked with a number of high-profile designers to develop their lines. “And of course, there should be a mix—not everything should be digital. But when [designers] see the cost, the supply chain and how good it’s gotten if you do it right, they’ll say, ‘Wow, OK, I get it.’”

The digital printing bonanza has helped spur along the cottage industry of production houses that specialize in the technology. At one end, there’s Spoonflower, a large consumer-focused company based in Durham, North Carolina, with roots in the DIY world—its interface allows users to upload a JPEG and order tiny increments of yardage without ever picking up the phone.

At the other, there are companies like Twenty2. Founded in 2001 by the husband-and-wife team of Kyra and Robertson Hartnett, Twenty2 began as a line of hand-screened wallpapers. In 2012, frustrated by slapdash production from manufacturers, the Hartnetts borrowed money from his parents and bought a digital printer to produce their own wallpaper collection. From there, they started doing it for others.

Today, Twenty2 is almost exclusively in the business of producing wallpapers and textiles on demand—all digitally printed—for trade-oriented brands. The Hartnetts’ own bona fides in wallpaper design have endeared them to a coterie of buzzy independents like Rebecca Atwood, St. Frank and Rule of Three. That, and a focus on sustainability and values—the Hartnetts are planning to announce a collaborative effort with the brands they print for to eliminate cultural appropriation in their designs—give Twenty2 the vibe of a cool under-the-radar record label.   

On a stormy day this summer, I drove to Connecticut to visit the company’s production facility. In the parking lot of the yellow brick building, the Hartnetts told me that, though they had only recently knocked down a wall and annexed another space, they were already running out of room. The pair had bought a new building that was double the size of their current space. Clearly, digital printing is a growth business.

A growing business is usually a crowded business. Inasmuch as there is one, the knock on digital printing is usually about the fact that it’s creating an oversaturated market. More than one industry expert made a wry joke on the subject, along the lines of: If I have to see one more quaint floral print on a cotton-linen blend…

A decade ago, digital printing was dismissed because the technology wasn’t good enough. Now, the critique is that it’s too easy. “We’ve absolutely encountered that stigma around digital printing,” says Hood. “People hear we use it and will ask, ‘Oh, did you just upload a bunch of files to Spoonflower?’” Ironically, though she and her co-founder remain fans of the technology, they’re currently exploring analog production methods like screen printing, partially as a way to differentiate Elliston House and break away from the pack of digitally powered brands.

An abundance of options isn’t exactly a tragedy, but there’s little doubt that the economics of digital printing have subtly shifted the ecosystem of the design business. Most experts I spoke to said it had only stoked the industry’s insatiable appetite for newness—because you can come out with new patterns more quickly, the industry comes to expect that you should.

And ironically, while digital printing opens up a seemingly limitless range of creative possibilities, a major use of the technology is to quickly copy what others are doing “As soon as someone knows what your bestsellers are, they can create a version of it that’s close,” says Kravet. “Years ago, that wouldn’t be the case because it could cost $12,000 to $15,000 to make the screens. Today, it’s relatively inexpensive and quick. And hey, if it doesn’t sell? They move on to something else.”

The rise of digital printing has lowered the barrier to entry, opening up a new avenue for independent artisans to bring a product to market. It’s hard to argue against that. But as the barriers shrink ever lower, it will introduce new, disorienting variables. As I researched the subject, I found myself wondering what the design world would look like if the process of digital printing was so cheap and simple that everyone in the industry had the equivalent of a textile mill in the back room of their office. Even more confounding: What if clients had the same thing?

Touring Twenty2’s production facility was like visiting a laid-back version of Willy Wonka’s factory, had Wonka been obsessed with color instead of sugar. Vibrant wallpapers, vivid textiles and curious machinery were in abundance. In one room, a group of young women—the company’s staff is almost entirely female—were busily matching newly printed wallpaper samples with the original standard, which is the “fingerprint” for the pattern. As they worked, upbeat music bounced along in the background, mixing with the ambient hum of printers in motion.

Digital files sit on a server, unchanging. But digital printers themselves produce results that can vary subtly from day to day, machine to machine. To combat that “drift,” Twenty2’s staff was printing tests and comparing them with the original under specialized lighting, then making tweaks in Photoshop to inch the result closer to an
identical match.

The wallcovering printers, housed in an adjacent room, had a comforting familiarity to them. In fact, they looked a lot like enormous versions of the same paper inkjet printers my parents had on their desk in the 1990s. Some, the Hartnetts explained, are faster—capable of producing a rich, saturated image with fewer “passes” of the printhead carriage—while others are attuned to printing on specialized grounds. All of the wallpaper printers are designed to operate unattended, so some of the production occurs at night—the factory can produce thousands of yards while its employees are asleep.

The textile production setup was more alien. Their printer, made by the Israeli company Kornit, is composed of two enormous black boxes, one for applying pigment ink and fixative to the ground, and the other for curing the final product. In total, the contraption was roughly the size of a Hummer. Printers that can produce wallpaper are often priced in the tens of thousands of dollars. Machines like the Kornit run into the hundreds of thousands.

The Kornit is a complicated beast. It uses pigment ink, not reactive dye, allowing it to run without producing wastewater—one of the environmental scourges of fabric production. However, because the ink is prone to congealing into paste inside the machine, it requires an external air compressor that runs 24 hours a day, keeping it circulating. As Robertson explained the technicalities of how the Kornit translates a digital file into yardage (“You have a lab value that goes into a RIP file, which is converted into a profile…”), I found myself struggling to keep up.

Later, we looked over some custom yardage that had been developed by an interior designer for a private client (I’m sworn to secrecy, but reader, you’d recognize her name). Arla Downing, Twenty2’s production design and color coordinator, explained that the print had required several iterations to translate the original design onto a tricky ground.  As we wandered upstairs to Twenty2’s administrative offices and design studio, Kyra told me about some of the more complicated projects the studio had developed. One required scanning antique quilts and then poring over enormous digital files to remove imperfections and create a repeat. Another involved taking hundreds of photographs of an ancient hand-painted mural and painstakingly re-creating it as a wallcovering.

The twist at the heart of the digital printing phenomenon is this: The method offers the illusion of simplicity—you take a file and hit print!—but in practice, it’s fiendishly complex. It’s also extremely human, with dozens of subjective decisions and constant finessing. I had started researching the subject thinking of digital printing as pure technology. What I found instead was a craft.

“It’s about detail, communication, knowledge—it’s actually all the boring bits, not the glamorous shiny machine,” Turnbull told me. “It’s the analogy of a Formula One car or a fighter jet. You can buy either one if you’ve got the wherewithal, but you’ve got to have the skill behind it. A number of customers have said, ‘Maybe we'll go and buy one of these [digital printers] ourselves.’ I’m always in the background saying, ‘You should do it! And while you’re at it, go buy a Formula One car too.’”

All of that craftsmanship is not cheap. In some cases, setting up a digital file can be just as expensive as buying a few silk screens. The allure of fast, inexpensive digital printing is only partially true. On the one hand, creating a simple pattern and quick-shipping a few yards is easier than it has ever been. On the other, building a sophisticated, standout product that can be consistently produced takes time, effort, care and real money.

Lurking behind that, of course, is the struggle of turning a cool fabric into a profitable business. “Creating the product is only part of it,” says Waggoner. “You need people who know how to sell it. You need distribution. You need to do sampling. You need to figure out shipping, and come out with new collections. You can’t just say, ‘Here’s my website, buy it!’”

Challenges like that create a natural barrier to digital printing in its loftiest forms and will prevent the flood of new entries to the market from becoming a permanent deluge. The fantasy that anyone can launch a great, lasting fabric brand with a few clicks of a mouse is compelling, but it’s just that: a fantasy.

The final critique of digital printing is one that has accompanied all technological advancements: Who gets left behind? To be clear, most experts I spoke with were not deeply concerned about the death of analog production. More traditional rotary printing, in particular, isn’t going anywhere (if you print thousands of yards, it’s still cheaper than digital—at least for now). And labor-intensive methods like hand block printing will always have cachet for connoisseurs.

But the same experts agreed that digital printing is ascendant, and as the technology improves, it will likely continue to steal market share away from other methods—especially screen printing. Those who cherish tradition and recoil from an increasingly digital future will find cause for lament.

For others, the environmental benefits are more than worth the trade-off. For them, sustainability—not creative control or cheaper production—is the true allure of digital printing. “The sustainability aspect is real,” says Saana Baker, a textile designer and founder of fabric trend publication The Textile Eye. “Think about a rotary pattern with 12 colors. Those screens have to get created, and then every time you produce the pattern you have to clean the ink off of them. So you’re wasting water, you’re wasting ink, you’re wasting energy. Then you have to store the screens properly, [which means] keeping the heat and lights on. The difference in environmental footprint between traditional printing and digital printing is massive.”

Not all digital printing rigs are equally sustainable. A lot depends on the details: what kind of dyes or pigments are used, the chemical treatment of grounds, wastewater treatment, energy efficiency and much more. But at the very least, the print-to-order model means that far less yardage ends up unused, rotting in a warehouse or—more often than not—tossed in a landfill.

All of that made me wonder if, as designers and their clients become more and more attuned to sustainability as a selling point, one day digital printing could hypothetically be seen as a badge of honor—something to market around rather than a detail to gloss over. For some, that day is already here.

“We are pushing the green aspect,” says Waggoner. “It’s not hypothetical at all.”