A traditional printing technique where plastisol or water-based inks are pushed through a photographic mesh stencil onto fabric.
Screen Printing is a traditional, highly popular apparel decoration technique where liquid inks are physically pressed through a woven mesh screen onto fabric. The process requires creating a photographic stencil on a tensioned screen mesh for each individual color in the design. The screen is loaded onto a manual or automatic carousel printer, aligned, and a rubber squeegee is used to push ink (either thick, vibrant Plastisol or soft, breathable Water-Based inks) through the open mesh areas directly onto the garment. Screen printing is the global gold standard for high-volume bulk apparel production because the per-unit ink cost is extremely low once the stencils are set up. However, the setup cost for screen preparation is high, and printing multi-colored graphics or gradients requires multiple screens. This makes screen printing completely incompatible with print-on-demand fulfillment (which requires printing single, full-color garments economically), though it remains ideal for bulk manufacturing.