Quality control!

While I had a break in Australia I was able to take some of the samples I had made in China and really put them through their paces. I wanted to do this actually hoping to find some flaws and poor quality in some of the products so that i can learn how to better recognize faults with some product development processes and how to avoid problems and guarantee quality.

 One of the problems I encountered was with one of the Gangstarship T-shirts, the shirt had a very involved 16 colour silk screen print on it. It looked great but after about 4-5 washes the print started to lift off the fabric. You could wash them as many times as you liked if you washed them by hand in cold water but you can't expect customers to do that, so back to the drawing board.

 This really made me look closer into the colours, print processes and washing abilities of different products. I took some of the samples back to the factory where I had them  made and explained what was going wrong. We then started to investigate the possibilities of why this shirt print is coming off.

 After many theories and print attempts we nailed it, so a new quality control step was needed to be put in place. From now on what I do with my t-shirt factories is actually have multiple samples made of the same product and leave one as how the factory gave it to me and then get one of the other samples and  wear it and have it dry cleaned thoroughly and wear it again and dry cleaned again and so on..... After many wears and washes we look at how the actual print, the colour of the print and the colour and shape of the fabric has turned out compared to the untouched sample from the factory.

After doing this a few times now I  have recognized a number of processes and fabrics that do not work well together and also how I can implement these same new quality control measures amongst many to other products.

Quality control is vital...