Hawaiian Shirts, from Conception to the Consumer

Hawaiian shirts, from conception to the consumer.

Welcome to the first in a series of posts outlining how Hawaiian shirts are made.

While the consumer only sees the completed shirt, there are a lot of processes that must first occur. So lets jump right in with coming up with a design and a brief overview of that process. I am one of those people that map out everything in my head and rarely put anything on paper myself and I place a lot of emphasis on how our customers will perceive the design on the fabric.

Remember that you have maintain your “Aloha identity” while at the same time satisfying your customers needs.

Once I have the overall Hawaiian design in mind, I will contact our Hawaiian design artist and she will start the process of extracting the information. The first renditions for our Hawaiian designs come to us as sketches, once the general concept is nailed down we discuss the repeat and then move on to coloring. Shown on this page is a print that is in its 4th iteration with partial colorizing, but it should be enough to illustrate how its done.

Eventually we make it to the point where we have the design approved and locked and ready to go to the printer. But that’s just one leg of the long journey, while you may have print ready Hawaiian artwork, you are far from having cut ready Hawaiian print fabric. The next step involves what is called strike-offs, whereas the design is sent overseas for screen setup and once those are prepared, the printer will run off about 1 yard of printed fabric, that is what’s referred to as the strike-off. Once that has been ran we will receive digital images for review, if all looks good the strike-off is then sent back to us for approval or rejection.

Due to variations in dye lots you may or may not get the actual colors you originally anticipated, so seeing the physical strike-offs are mandatory. Unfortunately some strike-offs do get rejected and its back to square one. But given the fact that you didn’t print and essentially ruin 3000 yards of Hawaiian fabric, it’s a minor setback.

Ok so now we are 8 to 10 weeks into the process, assuming the colors and repeat are what you were looking for its time to sign off on the strike offs and begin printing. Well you hope they will start right away but that’s not always the case. In many countries you have to deal with things like Chinese New Years whereas the plants shut down for a month and in some instances the local governments will shutdown entire industrial power grids to conserve electricity. Typically the entire process of going from design to printed Hawaiian fabric is about 3 months but you should also be prepared to wait as long as 5 months, and that does not factor in shipping which is usually by sea.

We hope you found this informative and come back to read our next post, where we will be discussing Hawaiian shirt patterns and cutting.

Mahalo,

The crew at Wave Shoppe Hawaiian Shirts