VON B Digital

VON B are one of the leading digital textile printers in Sub-Saharan Africa. Based in Durban, South Africa, VON B produces and sells thousands of square metres of digitally printed fabric and apparel every week to a variety of customers worldwide. VON B use both dye sublimation ink and pigment ink for their textile printing and in 2014 were looking for a new pigment solution to fulfil their needs. Managing Director Nick Van Beerlere explains: 

"Our clients include top brands in the décor and fashion apparel industries. Following our success with dye-sublimation on synthetic fabrics, we soon realised that pigment would become the future ink technology, which could serve the needs of our customers' cotton print requirements. This primarily due to cost effective process of pigment as well as the fact that the process is waterless and extremely eco-friendly; something our customers were increasingly demanding.

The variety of industrial branded digital pigment inks we had previously tested were always compromising in certain areas and not producing the quality we required both in terms of colour density, printability as well as on all levels of fastness and resistance properties in the wash.

We were looking for a better solution for our wide-format digital pigment textile inkjet printers… and came across Mexar Ltd.

We found the Mexar team to be extremely approachable and they understood our requirements and previous frustrations immediately. Mexar staff worked tirelessly with us to develop a bespoke water-based pigment ink which printed superbly through our fleet of Roland hybrid textile printers. Development since has never stopped; and we have worked with Mexar on increasing the pigment loading, speed of ink deposition and have recently made a significant breakthrough in the rub fastness of pigment prints.

We are extremely happy with the products Mexar have produced for us and the technical input they have had to our business requirements over the years. We have recently grown our investment in larger industrial printing presses for our pigment division, all backed by the confidence we have in our Mexar digital textile pigment inks and our customers' satisfaction with the print quality and advantages we are able to offer with pigments over traditional cotton dyes. The pigment inks created have increased our speed of printing and the quality of print we now achieve is much higher than we ever thought was possible."