IDC Research Director Tim Greene was the Wide Format Service Director at InfoTrends back in 2014. Later that year, he moved to IDC where he has since been a research director. I recently spoke with Tim at the Kornit Konnections user group conference in Miami and asked him how he got interested in textile printing, since back in those days, InfoTrends was primarily focused on the commercial print, sign and display, and packaging markets.

“I’ve been at IDC for 11 years now,” he said. “And during my career I’ve been involved in multiple multi-client and custom studies looking at  digital textile printing. Looking back, I believe this market has evolved at an amazing rate. In the early days, it was mostly about sampling—technically, can we make digital ink stick to fabrics and textiles? It’s come a long way since that and the economics have changed quite a bit and there’s literally no element of the market that hasn’t gotten dramatically better.”

As a veteran of several analog-to-digital transitions in print-related industry segments, I’ve always felt that we are moving too slowly. And especially in textiles, a massive industry, I’ve been known to be a bit impatient with the slow progress of increasing the percentage of fabrics printed digitally—it’s been sort of stuck around 10% for some time, depending on who you talk to. But even in commercial printing, it took a couple decades before digital color printing was ubiquitous in the market. And it’s a much smaller industry than textiles and apparel! That’s why I was interested in Tim’s more realistic assessment.