39-22-35 …those would be Barbie’s measurements if she were a life size person. Shrink her down to her 11 inch doll size and make her a swim suit that fit’s perfectly with a 4 inch square piece of fabric. That’s what we do every day.

Producing Barbie’s fashions makes Mattel one of the largest clothing manufacturers in the world. Every year we design a new swimsuit for Barbie and each of her friends and we manufacture over 12 million of those tiny swimsuits. Every two seconds one Barbie doll is bought somewhere in the world and an average American girl owns a total of 8 Barbie dolls. To clothe these dolls, Mattel spends several million dollars on fabric and trim each year, purchased from seven different countries and over sixty fabric vendors. About six years ago I was hired by the Mattel design center in the softgoods department, where I was responsible for providing the fabric and parts for samples for TV commercials, sales samples and catalog shoots for Barbie’s fashions. Ruth Handler, the inventor of Barbie, learned in the early 1960’s that Mattel would need to design their own textiles for each individual doll, because most textile companies don’t work on our tiny scale or with our crazy design themes. We do almost all of our textile production in Asia. TV commercials and catalog shoots are often done well before production fabric samples are available for prototypes.

Back then, we would have almost every fabric for the prototypes hand-painted, or we took it to a T-shirt screen-printer to have it printed. We tried printing fabric on our older Iris printer, but it used vegetable dyes in 4-color process which meant we couldn’t print on a lot of our most commonly used fabrics. That’s when we started doing research on bigger better textile digital printers.

This was in 1997 and there were not a lot of printers to choose from. After researching, we decided on the Stork TCP 4001 printer, an 8-color process, reactive dye drum printer. Before we purchased our Stork printer, we did a cost analysis by checking with each of the individual Mattel work groups and we discovered that our design center in El Segundo, California was spending several hundred thousand dollars per year having outside vendors hand-paint and screen print fabric for prototypes. The purchasing of the stork printer was pretty easy to justify, and it paid for itself the first year we owned it.

Owning the Stork printer changed our procedures. We hired a full time operator to run it. We also developed a work order system so that anyone at Mattel could have fabric digitally printed for any reason; from printing special tablecloths for display tables at toy shows to printing the army fatigues for our Max Steele doll. We can print a sample within an hour of the art being digitally designed. We also acquired a 4-color process Tektronix wax ink printer for the designers to use for printing fabric when they can’t wait for Stork printing.

Textile digital printing changed our skills a bit also, as you need to have digital computer art very early in the design cycle. Our production designers had to become very computer literate, and now they have reached a point where they usually start their designs on the computer, without any hand-painted art. Textile digital printing also changed my own responsibilities; after purchasing it I became a computer graphics production artist. I produce computer textile design and I also provide much of the digital art for the 25 toy designers that I work with.

Textile digital printing caused some visible changes in our product. Digitally printing our fabric for our prototypes eliminated the barriers of printing for the designers and has given them a whole new way of expressing themselves and increasing their expectations. I believe that when you help a designer make a better prototype, you’ll end up with a better-looking product from production.

While you can analyze cost, it’s difficult to analyze the difference in quality that we get from our digital printer. If you looked at Barbie five years ago, we were very reliant on glitter to decorate our textiles because it was easy for the designers to use on prototypes. The designers did not have an easy way to print fabrics. That made it a solid color market, which is not very exciting for toys.

Textile digital printing isn’t just fast, it prints a thinner line, finer detail and beautiful smooth gradations with a softer hand. It’s a better quality than what we could have ever had hand-painted or silk-screened. And we can print more true color or photo-realistic images.

I’ve given a description of the textile digital printing that we do for our prototypes, now let’s talk about a textile digital printing toy that is out on the market. Some of you may already know that little girls have been digital printing on textiles for years. The Barbie fashion designer CD ROM and fabric kit that has been in your local toy stores for the past four years. The kit comes two different kinds of paper-backed fabric so that the little girl can design and print her own fabric on her parent’s color or black and white printer. It also comes with markers and paint so she can color in her own design if she has a black and white printer. After she prints them she can cut and tape the fashion together with the special tape that comes with the kit.

Our future plans for textile digital printing include buying an Accuplot, which is a textile digital printer made by Mutoh, for our FisherPrice office in east Aurora, New York for their prototypes. We have also recently purchased an Acculpot for our softgoods engineering office in China since they now are making most of our sales samples. That leaves the Stork printer we bought for our El Segundo design center more available to use as a design tool, and hopefully that will help shorten our lead time for printing. The Accuplot is a 6-color process roll to roll printer with Gretag MacBeth software and a Wasatch RIP. It doesn’t give us quite the color gamut of 16 million colors of the 8 color process Stork printer, but it gives us a close 12 million. Also, the roll to roll capability is a huge advantage for Fisher price as they do many larger products than the 11-inch doll we usually work on at the design center. The Accuplot also provides very bright, flat color, which we love.

We are also doing research on textile digital printing for production. We may make hundreds of thousands or even millions of each fashion, but since Barbie’s skirt only takes up a 4-inch square of fabric, we often have minimum order quantity problems. Our goal is to turn this prototyping tool into a production tool and we hope that digital textile printing will someday help solve those minimum order quantity problems.

I would like to talk about what we at Mattel would like to see from the textile digital printing community in the future.

• We need very flat color. That pixilated or dotted effect is OK for signs or art that is meant to be seen from far way, but it makes tiny artwork meant to be seen very close look messy.
• We need a wider color gamut, for some reason purple and violets aren’t very bright or pretty. Bright and pretty are very important in our business. We would like to print fluorescents, even as a spot color if necessary.
• We hope that someday digitally printed textiles will not need to be pre-treated or post –treated. Our Stork printer uses reactive dye inks and they need to be steamed in an industrial steamer.
• Until that day comes we need more pre-treated fabric choices; Jacquard has many great fabrics to choose from, but we would like fabrics with more shine, shinier satins, tricots, velveteen, etc.
• We would like those fabrics to be cheaper; the cost of pre-treated fabrics is one of the reasons we have not been able to justify digital printing for production thus far. The other reason is we need digital printers to be faster at a higher dpi minimum of 360 for our tiny prints.
• We would like to see specialty inks that change color in the sun or in water, that are metallic or look like foil printing.
  

These are just some of the items on our wish list that will help us to use production digital printing in the future.