IMPRESSIONS from a Cross-section

Sector Pulse

Nuno Venda
Marketing Manager
ROQ

Company Details

Business Area:

Manufacturer of automatic screen printing machines

What are the key trends and innovations in textile printing? From which regions do you see the demand for textile printers emerging? What is the biggest challenge in your field?

We notice more and more big brands, designers, haute couture and new niche markets are laying their faith in screen printing. There has been an increase in demand for water based inks, rather than traditional plastisol inks. This demand is not only in ink to textile printing but also in experimenting with techniques and materials. The key trend is diversification to be unique.

We construct industrial screen printing machines. We see this trend as a huge opportunity. It is bringing interesting challenges such as reducing setup times so that the printer is used more. The versatility of using alternative materials such as flock or foil on an automatic machine while maintaining quality and speed is also a need sought on several markets.

Screen printing is over 4,000 years old. Its principles have been explored in detail. The focus for the last 40 or 50 years has been to upgrade technology through frugal innovation. This led to significant increase of quality, productivity and profitability. In 2015, ROQ launched the hugely successful ROQfog. This module allows for the screen printer to print with water based inks, increasing productivity and quality.

We believe innovations like this will be most common in this type of machinery, since there is a need to upgrade these machines to be relevant to the contemporary scenario where everything is connected to something. Printers want to be more competitive to respond to their most demanding customers with price, quality and deadlines. We, as a global brand, are selling extremely well, especially in emerging markets like Kenya. We have met with unexpected success in other African markets.

Digital screen printing machines produce prints of excellent quality but they have restrictions that the traditional screen printing do not have. So, the biggest challenge is to generate the same quality output and level of detail of a digital screen printing machine in an ROQ screen printing machine. One of our goals is to provide the same output of digital printing but with the advantage of screen printing costs per print and production speed.

Published on: 17/05/2016

DISCLAIMER: All views and opinions expressed in this column are solely of the interviewee, and they do not reflect in any way the opinion of Fibre2Fashion.com.