Ink is the blood of screen printing, and the vast majority of ink used in the US is plastisol. While Ryonet has grown alongside its customers, we have also grown and evolved our ink offerings over the years. I’m excited to share with you where we are going now and how this new evolution can positively impact your screen printing operation!
A Brief History
There are a lot of ink brands in the United States’ plastisol arena, but the two largest are Wilflex and Rutland. The first ink that came included in our eBay kits was Union, a Rutland brand, because it was the ink Brandon and I used to print punk rock shirts at the time. As we officially began our business, Union would not just give some dude making screen printing presses (out of wood no less) in his garage a dealership, so we decided to transition into Triangle. Then not long after, to International Coatings which we have sold since then. International Coatings is a solid ink manufacturer based out of California and Georgia that has been a great partner for Ryonet. Ryonet’s primary business during our early years were starting and growing screen printing shops, however as those screen printers grew we found that many of them looked for other ink solutions that better suited their needs, and as a result, would buy less and less of their plastisol from us. To be honest, I never understood this. Ink is ink I thought, why not just buy ink from Ryonet? Then we found a water based product in Green Galaxy that was easy to print and felt great on the shirt, so we shifted a lot of our focus to that because it does make a better quality end product. All this time we never really knew what we were missing in having a top quality plastisol that had the performance and feel of a leading ink. As our customers continued to expand with ROQ automatics and larger operations we could tell we had to do something about our plastisol ink offering to better serve them. After a year of discussions internally and externally, with both major industry brands, we were able to put together a program with our new partner Wilflex PolyOne which brings us to where we are today and the reason for this post.
We are excited and proud to be where we are today because we know we are providing our customers the best products in the industry. From ink to equipment to chemicals to supplies, we’ve got you covered.
Thanks for reading!
-Ryan Moor
