Products with designs that can be printed with direct-to-garment (DTG) are 100% cotton, such as our T-Shirts (with exception to heather colors which contain polyester).
Given that Geek Tropical designs are required to be vibrant, Geeknit is made from a poly/spandex mix that will take to sublimation and be suitable for the all-over printing we apply to everything on our store. Sublimation doesn't work with natural materials like cotton alone, particularly on our license prints where they must remain true to the original design. If you sublimate on cotton, you would need to apply a layer of polyester that holds the print, defeating the purpose while severely compromising the quality and durability of the printed graphics.
Of course, there are other printing methods that work better on cotton. One is block printing, which is a process done by hand and is much better for relatively simple designs with limited colors, not the rich full-color, licensed illustrations we focus on. We also considered reactive printing. It's another print process that can achieve those soft natural feeling, full color, all-over effects.
The problem?
Reactive and block printing comes in big batch runs, which means we'd need a big number of people to pre-buy our products in bulk and hope they sell. It comes with large amount of water waste, high energy consumption, and lots of chemical processes. In fact, only considering the water impact, if we could purchase just a single unit per variant in our store and find a way to sell or store the inventory, the water consumption would amount to five olympic swimming pools (12,500,000 liters of water)!
This wouldn't align with our business model: We make everything on-demand so we’re able to feature thousands of artists’ illustrations and with as little as waste as possible.
