The Abingdon, Oxfordshire-based outfit wanted to transfer t-shirt printing into a one-step process and spent a long time researching the market before managing director Ady Burton settled on the Epson, which he said represented the best ROI.

The £15,000 machine was installed at the end of October by supplier Xpress. It also comes with extra modules, including a heat press and pre-treatment module. Total for the machine including modules is £25,000.

Burton said: “After the summer we were spending quite a bit on using a two-part process to make transfers, we had screen print, then cut vinyl, then went back to screen print but didn’t want the expense of making screens; it’s a bit dated.

“I went out and looked at a few different bits of equipment then saw the Epson on a mailer and thought it seemed ridiculously cheap in comparison to others and when I went out and looked at it it was brilliant.

“It’s been brilliant and has just brought us back into a market that we were moving away from. Maintenance is ridiculously simple, every morning you come in, turn it on, put a bit of solution in the head area, it runs it through the pipes and that’s it.”

Burton added that the Epson’s Garment Creator software means a job can be priced before it is started. It has just taken on a new job printing on 3,500 t-shirts through the machine from 4 Jan. He said it prints at around one-and-a-half minutes per white t-shirt and three minutes per black t-shirt.

Launched in 2013, it prints t-shirts, caps and fabric bags up to 25mm in thickness at resolutions of up to 1,400dpi, and uses Ultrachrome DG inks.

SEW also runs a number of SWF embroidery machines, along with having a large-format division, in which it runs Roland cutters and a Roland Versacamm VS-540.

Formed in 1994 by Burton’s father Keith, 12-staff SEW turned over just shy of £1m last year.