aleph's success in inkjet is the result of symbiotic interaction with its customers. And the new generation of LAFORTE industrial printers is already an affordable innovation icon
Como is universally recognised as the centre of innovation for silk, the place of origin of what we call "digital textile", to the point of attracting the investments of the most important multinational inkjet brands. Not everyone knows that the silk tradition of the city of Como has its roots in the Middle Ages, that the cultivation of the silkworm in Como dates back to the Dukedom of Milan in 1300, and was enhanced by Ludovico Sforza in 1400. Since then, the textile industry has been a tradition handed down from father to son, which has given impetus to hundreds of family businesses and encouraged the activity of brilliant inventors and shrewd entrepreneurs. This is the case of Alessandro and Roberto Manes, co-authors of promising startups and founders of aleph, whose adventure begins with powerful software for design, variant and printing, to focus in the early '2000s on the production of advanced and affordable inkjet printers. An intuition that has led dozens of textile printers in Como to rely on aleph for their digital transformation, generation after generation. If not the first to develop an industrial inkjet printer, aleph certainly has the merit of having faced this challenge originally, in keeping with its mission to make accessible, usable and rapidly amortizable technology that for over a decade has remained the prerogative of large printing houses. So, before we talk about how LAFORTE is supporting the digitisation of textiles in Europe, North America, Korea and other high potential markets, we went back to where it all started. We chose two textile companies that bet on the LAFORTE project. Two of the hundreds of entrepreneurs who made Como an impregnable stronghold, the heart of global digital textile.
Giò&Giò digitises top quality and fast fashion collections
From the outside, it looks more like a sophisticated design atelier than an industrial warehouse, yet Giò&Giò is a very thriving textile business, which has been designing, manufacturing and marketing printed fabrics since the 1970s, ranging from natural to synthetic fibres. As in the best practices of Como, the production area is the logical extension of a large style office, where skilled designers work every day to transform the ideas and briefs of the fashion brands into textile patterns, produced in micro sizes or thousands of meters. The company jealously guards four decades of printed fabric samples, which at a glance make you dream of high fashion, the top brands of yesterday and today. This is Como, a place where the border between design and production is blurred. To realise this, all we need to do is take a trip to the press room of Giò&Giò, where Matteo Tosato, the company's young Production Manager, welcomes us and with a relaxed look he stands up to three lines of aleph LAFORTE inkjet printers in full production. To be precise, two LAFORTE Paper for sublimation paper and one LAFORTE Fabric for direct printing onto fabrics with reactive dyes. "Until a couple of years ago, there were 13 aleph printers based on Mimaki JV5 and TX500 technology in this department, ten for paper and three for textile printing, each not exceeding 20 metres per hour. For the last two years, we have replaced them with three LAFORTE, each of which produces 180 metres/hour of excellent quality. So we can spend more time on prepress and value-added activities. - Explains Tosato. The levels of productivity, automation and repeatability introduced by LAFORTE allow the Gio&Giò team to manage large quantities. Or merge several micro-jobs into a single processing queue, limiting setup times, machine downtime, maintenance and reel changes to a minimum. In addition to the lower service costs, made possible by the robustness of LAFORTE Paper, another advantage is the patented vacuum belt, which introduces micrometric precision in the feeding of lighter papers. "On the old Mimaki we could feed 250 metre reels of 70/80 gsm paper, while today we use jumbo reels and we go down to 45 or even 18 gsm weights, increasing the capacity to 1,150 or 2,000 linear metres - explains Tosato - So we reduced the purchase costs, and from one reel change every hour we load just one big reel per day. Then, by using ultra-lightweight paper, we obtain enormous savings in colourants". Giò&Giò provides high fashion brands with direct printing on silk, cotton and viscose with reactive dyes. But also fast-fashion operators, for whom they produce high volumes of printed polyester. The orders, often thousands of metres long, are processed in the morning, and the evening they are ready for shipment. Moving from thirteen artisan printers to three industrial units have therefore translated into efficiency, operator motivation and the ability to manage production peaks calmly, but also into higher perceived quality. "That with aleph is a close and exclusive relationship, which we constantly cultivate - concludes Tosato - Having a single supplier for hardware, software and inks give security. And a direct relationship, mostly by telephone, with aleph's support team, allows us to deal with any possible doubts or criticalities".
Nuova Zenith is tradition and full cycle innovation
Nuova Zenith's journey began in 1985, when Paolo Rigamonti started his activity as a photo engraver, at the service of the great textile printers of the Como district. These are roaring years, in which the competence on the image and chromatic separations, the knowledge of the chemistry and photographic processes, necessary to produce films and to expose screens, make the experts of prepress the real magicians of textile printing. At the same time, Nuova Zenith introduced their first flatbed and rotary silk-screen printing machines, gaining experience in the production of textile patterns. In the mid-1990s, the growing demand for samples and the contraction in volumes led Rigamonti to buy its first inkjet printer, soon followed by a Mimaki TX2 integrated by aleph with a sticky belt, whose productivity was 3-4 meters/hour. The rest is history. And the last two decades, for Nuova Zenith and its counterparts, have been a continuous pursuit of performance, industrialisation of inkjet, and inexorable migration of volumes from analogue to digital. In recent years, Rigamonti led Nuova Zenith towards quality production for luxury brands and fashion brands, whose needs go beyond perfect colour rendering. "We are not the specialists of huge volumes, but the reference point for scarves, ties and fashion accessories made with silk, cotton, wool, cashmere and other precious fabrics – explains Rigamonti – Here you can enter with your design, or even just an idea, and come out with a printed piece of cloth. The minimum quantity is one metre, the maximum is virtually infinite". Nuova Zenith is an integrated company, from design to pre-treatment of the fabric, to printing (strictly digital), steaming and washing, up to the most varied types of finishing. The prepress uses the most advanced versions of the aleph software for printing and variant, including SmartPrint and SmartColor, as well as the inevitable Photoshop. On the lower floor is the all-digital printing department, which also focuses on the different generations of aleph printers. "Twenty-two years ago we bought the first TX2 from aleph, then a few years later the first JV5s, and finally the TX500s, which we still use today for tiny batches printed with acid dyes" - explains Rigamonti. The relationship between Nuova Zenith and aleph has been symbiotic for over two decades, to the point that the Como-based printer is one of the first to believe in the LAFORTE project since 2015, and in 2017 he installed the first LAFORTE Fabric 200 with reactive inks. The leap towards an industrial printer with Kyocera heads, which increases productivity tenfold, is a paradigm shift for the company. "In terms of quality, homogeneity and productivity, we have leaped into the future - continues Rigamonti – What we produced with five machines in two shifts, we now do on one, with consistent quality from the first to the last metre. Our product today is not comparable with that of our competitors". While remaining focused on high quality, Nuova Zenith produces 1,500 linear metres daily with just one LAFORTE, to which a second one will soon be added. What makes the relationship between Nuova Zenith and aleph unique, however, goes beyond the customer/supplier relationship and concerns a shared approach to research and development, which we would define holistic. "We have entered the digital world together, and together, we have grown technically. Since the beginning we have shared seriousness, coherence, adherence to the same technical/qualitative goals, which are not limited to an acceptable result, but aim at a digital print identical or better than the most refined screen printing" – says Rigamonti. It is no coincidence that Nuova Zenith is one of the biggest admirers of aleph's end-to-end offering, which is not limited to the printer but includes consulting, software, printing and fixation hardware, ink and process chemistry. "The more traditionalists consider this verticalization of the process binding, or apparently more expensive, but they ignore that it is the only sustainable way to ensure stable processes, repeatable quality and secure margins" - concludes Rigamonti.
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