Individual textile printing, just one mouse click away

A start-up offering customers the opportunity to create fabric in their own design by using digital printing.

A young start-up from Poland, CottonBee, offers a special service enabling customers to design their own fabrics. The company specialises in doing small print runs with individual patterns, supplying its product to private individuals or business clients with runs even as short as 1 metre of fabric. The fabric is printed digitally using Mimaki machines. The offer includes different textiles, ranging from 100 percent cotton to mixed fabrics in different weights. The printed width varies according to the material in question and ranges from 140 to 156 cm. The printer uses the U.S. web-coated (SWOP) v2 CMYK profile.

Orders are accepted via the company’s website, where customers can upload their own personal patterns or choose motifs from the company catalogue. There is no minimum order requirement and a 20 x 20 cm sample can be ordered if customers are not sure if their selected design is really quite what they want. The entire production process, from sending out the original order to the product being ready for dispatch, takes about five working days.

When founded five years ago, the company started out with a Mimaki digital printing solution. “As a start-up enterprise, we only had a limited budget and didn’t initially require a large production capacity. Nevertheless, we had strict selection criteria when it came to print quality and throughput. We also needed a system that was simple to operate”, says Michał Laskowski, cofounder of the company, regarding their choice of technical supplier.

The start-up availed itself of a local retailer, benefitting from his printing expertise and experience in the field of textile printing. Their own e-commerce know-how also came into play, helping to provide the basis for their successful business concept.

In the meantime, CottonBee has 15 employees, has processed around 28,000 orders, printed 185,000 m² of fabric and established itself as a niche company in the textile trade. As well as supplying private consumers, it also focuses on serving small companies in the industry, interior designers and costume and set designers from the world of film and theatre.