LFP - Large-Format-Printing

Vermarcsport gets going with the new FP-740

Tuesday 14. December 2010 - Frans Verbeeck founded Vermarcsport in 1977. Vermarc, named after Verbeeck's son Marc, is specialised in the printing of cycling and other sportswear. In the past years, the company has dressed many sports teams. At the moment, they make the clothes for various well-known cycling teams e.g. Silence-Lotto and Quick Step-Innergetic

In the early years, they printed acrylic and woollen sweaters with velvety flock letters. Because this was a dusty and unhealthy work, Frans looked for new technologies. He discovered the sublimation technique in Italy. Together with Roland DG, he investigated the possibilities of using sublimation. With this, Vermarc was one of the trendsetters of modern textile printing in Belgium.

Around the turn of the century, Vermarc started to work with an FJ-500. This is a machine that was developed by Roland Japan to print photo quality with eight colours on conventional materials like photo paper and canvas art papers. These printers were compatible with the sublimation inks and were used a lot in the textile market. Vermarc used its printer mainly to make prototypes and special pieces like the shirt of the world champion. As the prices for the paper and ink used for sublimation became comparable to those of conventional techniques like screen printing, Vermarc started investing more in sublimation. The company chose for an SJ-740, because the capacity of this printer was remarkably higher. From that day on, the company could easily produce smaller series. Afterwards, Vermarc bought – as one of the first companies – an FP-740.

Nick Meeus, an employee of Vermarc, explains: “I work with our Roland printer every day and I’m very satisfied with it. The colours and density of the prints are great. The speed is good as well: we make 14 custom-made sets an hour with our new FP-740. So, our Roland machine is working continuously.”