Diaz - Production of Digitally Printed Curtains
THE CHALLENGE
With its headquarters based in West-Flanders - Belgium, Diaz Sunprotection is a renowned manufacturer of sun protection products like curtains, roller blinds, Venetian blinds, Roman shades and much more. All products are made in-house by a team of dedicated and experienced employees. Next to the standard woven designs, Diaz offers their customers the possibility to choose from a wide selection of digitally printed curtain designs.
Products in user story: 3x ValueJet 1638WX & 2x ValueJet 2638
TWO KINDS OF ROLL FABRICS
Diaz have five Mutoh ValueJet printers in use. Three ValueJet 1638WX printers with a print width of 162 cm and two ValueJet 2638 printers with a print width of 260 cm. All machines use Mutoh DS2 sublimation inks. Diaz Marketing Manager Gilles Vanhee explains: “The reason for the two print widths is that we use two kinds of roll fabrics. A flexible fabric for curtains that comes in a standard width of 140 cm, and a stiffer fabric for the production of roller blinds that has a width of 240 cm. So, depending on the type of curtain, we either print the image on the smaller ValueJet 1638WX or the larger ValueJet 2638.Once the design is printed onto the special paper media, it is then transferred to the curtain fabric on our roll-to-roll sublimation heat presses.”
ON DEMAND PRODUCTION
Window curtain fashion trends are changing faster than ever before. That abundance of choice is very nice for the end user, but for a window decoration manufacturer like Diaz, it’s quite a challenge. Gilles Vanhee: “Stock, and especially too much of it, is a daily concern. Make the wrong choices and you end up with some unsellable stock. That’s one of the reasons why we creat-ed our own digital collection with trendy curtain designs that are produced on demand. Once the customer order is placed, we put our printers to work and only produce the necessary amount of fabric for this specific order. No more unnecessary stock, with huge cost and space savings as a result.”
CUSTOMISED CURTAINS FOR A SENSATIONAL PROJECT
The majority of the designs are made in-house by a team of experienced designers, but some designs are also purchased. “Besides that, says Gilles Vanhee, there is a growing trend in customised designs for one-off projects. A nice example of this, are the curtains we created for the brand new Versluys Arena of football club KV Oostende.
Diaz Sunprotection has been a happy user of Mutoh sublimation printers for many years now. Not less than five ValueJet printers are used on a daily basis to produce digitally printed curtain designs.
