How custom jerseys are made

Full transcript

It starts as a drawing

A custom soccer jersey does not start as a shirt. It starts as a drawing, and it becomes cloth in that order: printed, pressed, cut, sewn, checked. This is how custom jerseys are made.

The cloth

It starts with the cloth. Polyester knit, on rolls, and more choice than most brands expect. Open mesh, where the shirt has to breathe. Micro mesh, finer holes and a smoother face. Jacquard, the pattern knitted into the cloth itself, white or already in your colour. Waffle, a texture you can feel. Gloss, a tight face that shines on camera. And if none of these fit, there are more on request. The fabric is chosen before the colour is, because the same ink lands differently on every one of these.

Printing on paper

Then the design gets printed, and not onto the shirt. Onto paper. A wide format printer lays the whole kit out in reverse, panel by panel, sleeve by sleeve, sized to the pattern it will become. At this point the ink is only sitting on a roll of paper.

Pressing: ink into the fibre

Paper and fabric then travel through a heated roller together. Under heat the ink turns straight from solid to gas and bonds inside the fibre of the polyester. It does not sit on top of the cloth, it dyes it. That is why a printed kit can be stretched, washed and played in all season without the pattern cracking or peeling off.

Cutting

Now it gets cut. The pattern is laid out to waste as little cloth as possible, then cut through many layers at once, so that every shirt in the run comes out the same. Fronts, backs, sleeves and collars, stacked and bundled by size.

Sewing

Sewing is where it becomes a shirt. Overlock machines close the seams with a stitch that stretches with the fabric, because a rigid seam on a moving body is a seam that opens. The work is split down a line, each operator repeating one operation. And a wall of thread exists so that a club colour gets matched, not approximated.

The crests

Crests are their own step. An embroidery head stitches the badge straight into the panel, needle by needle, one colour at a time. It is slow, and it is the detail people look at first.

Finishing and packing

Then the unglamorous part that decides whether you are happy. Pressing. Trimming threads. Measuring against the spec sheet. Folding, bagging and labelling every piece, so a carton landing on another continent can be sorted by size without opening a single bag.

What we do with factories like these

We are Votano Asia. We find factories like these, we stand on the floor while your order runs, and we handle samples, quality control and shipping to your door. Custom kit, or whatever else these buildings can make. Votano Asia. So you never have to hope.