Promoting the Brand with Custom Wearables
The Client
The Drop Shop was the rigging provider and gear store located within Skydive Chicago, a world-class skydiving resort and one of our neighbors in Ottawa, IL. In addition to skydiving activities, Skydive Chicago offers camping, disc golf, swimming, hiking, volleyball and rental space for events.
The Work
The Drop Shop wanted to help customers look good and feel good while also promoting the Skydive Chicago brand. Their garments of choice were custom dye-sublimated jerseys. The challenge for Adventure was creating a trendy design that utilized the brand’s colors and logo and then getting the garments produced and delivered efficiently and at a reasonable price.
Dye-sublimation is more conducive to customization than the more commonly known garment-decorating process, screen printing. With screen printing, multicolor designs require multiple screens with different ink colors to be properly aligned to create the desired look. It’s very labor-intensive, and the end result is a garment with an art imprint that sits on top of the fabric.
But with dye-sublimation, a mirror image of the design is first printed onto special transfer paper and then applied to the fabric using a heat press. The heat “sublimates” the ink, turning it from a solid directly into a gas. The gas penetrates the fabric and dyes it the desired color. The dye-sublimated fabric panels are then cut out and sewn together to complete the garment. Dye-sublimated garments look great because the artwork can flow to all sections — front, back and sleeves. It’s a look that’s impossible to achieve with screen printing.
To produce the eye-catching jerseys for The Drop Shop, we first had to bring the customer’s vision to life. Our award-winning design department took provided notes to develop a design concept that was tweaked to the customer’s satisfaction. After that, we utilized one of our top-rated vendors to produce the jerseys and had them delivered to The Drop Shop for display in the store.
Whether or not you would ever consider jumping out of an airplane, we think you’ll agree that this is one good-looking garment!
