03.25.2022
Raspberry Creek Fabrics is an online fabric store focused on apparel fabrics. We print thousands of designs in-house, using pigment and dye sublimation. Our print on demand business gives customers unlimited pattern choices but processing all those orders was a nightmare. Creating print lists, ripping files, and sorting orders required an army. Automation was the answer, yet finding the right software was a problem. How do you automate printing thousands of step-and-repeat designs on 30+ fabric bases with orders ranging from a half yard to 100+ yards?
Current automation systems create the impositions up front before the rip. Those systems see a 5-yard order, create a graphic file that is 5-yards long, and output a monster file to the rip. Those 100GB+ files stalled out every system in the path. Imagine orders of 20 yards or 200 yards using up-front impositions!
The solution? Our system rips the smallest possible file size for each order. Then, our software captures the rip output and inserts xml sizing information. Using xml, the printer workstations step and repeat the design, printing the order, sized automatically. After rip, orders wait in the cloud, batched by fabric type. Print operators select a fabric type and jobs roll into hot queues automatically. Orders flow seamlessly from our ecommerce website directly to the printers.