Prepare for impact

Founded near Cambridge in the mid 1990s, Xennia Technology has a strong background as an inkjet ink and process development company and is well known in the inkjet world for its technology development capabilities. It is less well-known in the textile printing industry, but this looks set to change.
“Xennia has been central to the industrial inkjet world for more than 15 years,” says Dr Tim Phillips, Xennia’s marketing manager, “developing technology for some of the major players in the industry. Xennia’s role was initially as a contract developer for other companies, and many inkjet products in the marketplace under other brands were in fact developed by us.”

Complete solutions
Xennia’s business strategy is to provide market-focussed solutions for digital decoration of specialist products, and textiles are at the core of this strategy. “Xennia is unusual in offering complete solutions for textile applications based around digital printing systems and inks,” says Phillips, “as well as all the technical support needed to help our partners make the technology work for them in their factories.”
Phillips believes that textile printing companies can benefit from Xennia’s solution approach. “Typically, purchasers of anologue printing equipment are used to buying systems and consumables separately,” he comments, “and they are wary of buying digital printers and inks from the same company. However, when introducing new technology there are often teething problems and this can degenerate into a ‘blame game’ scenario when several suppliers are involved – the ink supplier blames the printer for any problems and the printer supplier blames the ink. By offering a complete solution including technical support, we own the solution and its performance.”
In addition to hardware, consumables and technical support, Xennia’s solutions are packaged financially to manage printers’ capital investment and consumable costs. Phillips explains: “There are two key financial issues holding back adoption of digital technology in textile printing: the large capital investment to purchase a digital system, especially when compared with existing equipment that has already been depreciated, and the perception that digital ink costs are high, making them uncompetitive for production textile printing. We can make both these issues manageable in a way that works for printers.”
Xennia’s digital textile solutions range from high quality solutions aimed at high end fashion fabric production, through printing and finishing solutions intended for outdoor, advertising and technical textiles, to its new ultra high speed solution for low cost production textile printing from the recent acquisition of Osiris Inkjet Systems.
“The Osiris system prints at up to 2,880m2/hr – generally unheard of in digital textile printing – and with ink coverage of up to 33g/m2 is ideal for decoration of fabrics from fine silks to heavy furnishing fabrics,” says Phillips. “While the system has previously been perceived in the marketplace as being low quality, this is based on misconceptions about printing resolution. In fact the print quality is superior to that produced by rotary screen printing and is suitable for at least 80% of fashion and furnishing printing jobs.”

Inks
Xennia offers a range of inks for the textile printing market. Phillips states: “Our inks offer excellent colour, fastness and printing performance. In particular, our dye-based inks show superior colour intensity when benchmarked against competitor products.”
These inks are being offered not just as part of Xennia’s digital printing solutions, but also into existing systems in the industry. Phillips explains: “Our reactive dye ink was the first to be approved by Kyocera for use in its printheads, and the ink is being used in a rapidly growing installed base of production systems, displacing competitor inks and getting good feedback from users. Our acid and disperse dye inks are undergoing final customer testing and printhead approval, and will be launched at ITMA at the end of September. We are also working on some exciting new developments that will be announced early next year.”
To cope with rapidly rising demand for its inks, Xennia has opened a new purpose-built facility for manufacturing ink in production quantities. “Xennia’s business is based around ink, and as we move to commercialise our developments onto production lines using tens or hundreds of tonnes of ink per year, this facility was vital,” says Phillips.

Benefits
“There is some confusion in the industry about what digital textile printing is really for,” suggests Phillips. “It is often portrayed as a niche technology for one-off garment personalisation and very short runs for products such as couture scarves, but not for mainstream textile production. We believe this is incorrect, and that digital technology will replace traditional printing across many textile sectors over the next few years as both suppliers and printers realise that the ‘desktop model’ of excessively priced inks is outdated and unnecessary.”
“The key benefit of digital printing in the textile printing industry is rapid introduction of new designs – the only way textile producers will meet the increased demands of fashion and furnishing brands and retailers for more designs each year,” adds Phillips. “This inexorable move to shorter print runs means it is a manner of when, not if, digital printing will be introduced into mainstream textile printing.”
Phillips lists additional benefits: higher print quality and a broader range of colours; near-zero design setup cost; no replacement or storage of screens; lower manpower requirement; greatly reduced ink usage; lower inventory storage costs and the environmental and cost benefit of greatly reduced usage of water and energy for washing, fixing and drying the printed fabrics.
Then there is the controversial issue of printing costs. “The general industry view is that digital printing is more expensive,” says Phillips, “but this is based on an oversimplified cost model. Traditional printers focus on higher ink costs, but digital printing is often the lower cost per square metre option once all the savings are taken into account.”

Future
Together with its parent company, specialist materials leader TenCate, Xennia is developing technology for ‘digital finishing’ – the use of inkjet technology to apply water-repellent, self-cleaning and other functionalities to textiles. The ability to place functionality precisely onto different areas of the fabric, and to one side of the textile surface only, allows almost unlimited options for adding functional performance to textile designs. “We believe digital finishing is the future of textile production, and Xennia and TenCate are investing significant resources to achieve this,” adds Phillips.