Look closely at a JaOcCo print and you'll notice something screen-printed graphics rarely have: fine gradients, soft shadow detail, and color that doesn't feel stacked on top of the fabric. That's DTG — direct-to-garment printing — and it's the reason our designs can go from concept to fabric without simplifying the artwork to fit a printing limitation.
How DTG actually works
DTG printers work like a very precise inkjet printer, except the "paper" is a t-shirt. Water-based ink is sprayed directly onto the fabric fibers in layers, building up full-color, high-resolution artwork in a single pass. There's no film, no mesh screen, no physical stencil to burn for each color — the design file goes straight from screen to shirt.
That single difference — no screens — is what separates DTG from the printing method most apparel still uses.
DTG vs. screen printing
Screen printing pushes ink through a mesh stencil, one screen per color. It's fast and cheap at high volume, but every additional color means an additional screen, and fine detail — gradients, thin linework, photographic shading — gets flattened into solid blocks of color because that's what a screen can physically reproduce.
DTG has no such ceiling. A design with twelve colors costs the same to print as a design with two, and gradients print as gradients, not as a compromise. The tradeoff is scale: DTG isn't built for printing ten thousand identical shirts efficiently. It's built for printing exactly as many as are actually needed — which is precisely the point for a brand working in runs of a few hundred, not a few thousand.
Why it fits how JaOcCo actually produces
DTG prints one garment at a time, which means a design only gets printed once someone actually wants it. There's no minimum order pushing a brand toward overproduction, and no unsold stock sitting in a warehouse because a screen-printing minimum forced a run of 500 instead of 50. For pieces capped at 1,000 units worldwide, that's not a marketing detail — it's the only printing method that makes a limit like that operationally honest.
It's also a cleaner process at the ink level: water-based DTG ink uses less water and energy overall than the setup, curing, and screen-reclaiming steps that screen printing requires per color.
What this means for how the print wears
Because DTG ink is absorbed into the fibers rather than sitting on top of them, the print sits closer to the fabric than a thick screen-printed layer — it doesn't crack the way a rubbery ink deposit can after repeated washing. Understanding this is also why we're specific about wash care (see our guide on washing a graphic tee without damaging the print) — the ink behaves differently from what most people expect from a printed t-shirt.
Want to see what that looks like in practice? Check out the Love Eternal t-shirt.
Designed in Switzerland by an independent brand. Small batch — limited to 1,000 pieces worldwide. Made to order to reduce textile waste.