DTG at 30
An inventor’s look back & forward
By Matthew Rhome
Matthew Rhome was inducted into the Ben Franklin Honor Society at the 2026 PRINTING United Expo.
When people ask what it feels like to have invented the direct-to-garment (DTG) printer and help spark a multibillion-dollar industry, my answer tends to surprise them. At the time, it didn’t feel like an invention at all. It felt like an answer to my frustration. Specifically, the frustration of turning away small custom orders. Looking back, that frustration turned out to be the origin point of DTG printing as we know it today.
The T-shirt that started Rhome’s journey into the world of screen printing. It was his first paid order.
The foundation: Early years in screen printing
My introduction to screen printing came at age 14, when I printed shirts for my Boy Scout troop. There was something immediately satisfying about it — ink on a screen, a pull of the squeegee, a design appearing on fabric. I was hooked from day one.
I taught myself how to print, but I didn’t go it alone. I shared my interest with my school shop teacher, who remembered he had an Advance Process Supply catalog the school had received. Mr. Green, the company’s owner, was incredibly generous with his time when a young student called asking for screen printing technical details. I still keep that catalog in my library, and I even bought my first printer from Advance when I started my own shop years later.
By 18, in the early 1980s, I had turned that early passion into a real business, opening my own screen-printing shop. Running that operation gave me a close-up view of where the process worked well, and where it fell short. By the late 1980s, those observations had led me toward a new challenge: designing automated screen-printing equipment to address the inefficiencies I encountered daily on the shop floor. That work shifted my thinking from operator to systems designer, and it set me up well for what came next. In the early 1990s, I founded a software company focused on developing purpose-built tools for screen printers, bringing together my production background, my equipment experience, and the growing possibilities of digital technology.
It was that combination of craft, engineering, and software that brought me face-to-face with the limitation that would define the next decades of my career.
Rhome at his screen-printing shop at the age of 18.
Screen printing works beautifully at scale. An order for 500 identical garments? No problem. An order for 12, or for one? That’s a different story. The setup costs — burning screens, mixing inks, and registering colors — stay fixed regardless of order size. The result is a constant dilemma: turn away short run customers or absorb the loss to keep them happy and hopefully recoup it on larger orders. Short-run and on-demand work was the industry’s most persistent sore spot, and I was far from the only one who felt it.
A flyer promoting the “Revolution” printer in 1997.
Interior view of the “Revolution” flyer from 1997.
Rethinking the process
By the early 1990s, I had reached a clear conclusion: the answer wasn’t a better version of screen printing; it was a different process altogether. I started looking seriously at digital inkjet technology, asking a straightforward question: Could a garment be printed with the same directness and speed that a desktop printer brings to a sheet of paper?
My first instinct was to develop a hybrid system that combined inkjet imaging with elements of traditional screen printing. Since white inkjet ink for textiles hadn’t been developed yet, my initial idea was to screen print a white base and then apply CMYK colors on top via inkjet. I put a lot of real time into that concept and even lined up a couple of buyers for the prototype. But the further I went, the more it became clear that a hybrid approach would be too expensive and too complex for the mass market. My goal was to create something accessible for small- to mid-sized shop owners working with limited budgets and a few or no employees. At an estimated cost of over $1.5 million, a machine that only large, commercial operations could afford wasn’t going to solve the problem I cared most about.
So, I changed direction. The new goal was a compact, standalone, single-operator machine, something any shop — big or small — could adopt without specialized staff or a major capital investment.
The ‘Revolution’: Bringing DTG to market
In 1996, I partnered with my friends Andrew Romines and Caren Jessup to form Direct Imaging Systems (DIS) out of Bradenton, Florida, but the spark that made it real came earlier, out on the water. While jet-skiing in the Gulf of Mexico, I had a moment of sudden clarity. Take the hybrid technology I’d been developing, scrap the screen printing part, and scale it down into a compact, one-person machine that smaller shops could actually use and afford. I loaded up the jet ski on the trailer, drove home, and started to work. I pulled apart a flatbed scanner and a Canon inkjet printer sitting in my office, and stayed up through the night building.
By morning, I had a working prototype. It looked essentially like the DTG printers you’d recognize today; the design matched my soon-to-be-filed patent drawings almost exactly. I shared it with my partners, and their reaction was immediate: this is the machine we need to sell.
That prototype eventually became “The Revolution,” the first commercially available direct-to-garment printer in the world, and one I believe fully earned its name.
The patent application was filed on July 19, 1996. After a multiyear review, U.S. Patent 6,095,628 was granted on Aug. 1, 2000. That patent gave formal recognition to something I’d understood from the beginning: a single-operator DTG machine wasn’t just a practical improvement. It was a genuinely new solution to a challenge the industry had been living with for decades.
Rhome’s U.S. patent for the DTG printer, which was filed in 1996 and granted in 2000.
Of course, the machine itself was only the first step. We needed ink. An industry friend referred us to a company in California that manufactured specialized inks and dyes, and we contracted with them to produce inks compatible with the low-cost Canon print head. They connected us with a chemist named Dr. Jerry Woolf, who was known for inventing the erasable whiteboard marker. Dr. Woolf developed a CMYK textile ink that worked well with the Canon heads, and DIS began selling the Revolution in 1997.
We took the Revolution to most of the major trade shows for the next three years, and it always drew a crowd. Outside of a small group of early adopters, the printer met real resistance from parts of the industry that were skeptical about digital printing. Even so, we made some sales, enough to push me forward into designing the next model, called the “Evolution,” which I planned somehow to equip with white ink capability.
During that development phase, I needed a new printhead, specifically one using piezoelectric technology to handle larger particle-sized inks. That search led me into conversations with some of the leading printhead manufacturers in the world.
Rhome with the Brother Mat-1 DTG prototype in Nagoya, Japan, at Brother R&D.
Rhome and Harry Kira at the GT-541 Exhibit at the Brother Museum in Nagoya, Japan, in 2025.
Taking DTG to scale: Brother, Epson & beyond
One of those calls went to Brother International. I was surprised to learn they already knew about the Revolution printer. They felt DTG technology would complement their product line, particularly their embroidery business, and invited me to collaborate on building a ground-up DTG printer. The vice president of Brother was a true visionary and saw where this could lead. I had a discussion with my partners at DIS regarding the opportunity, and with their blessing, I accepted Brother’s offer.
In October 1998, I moved to Brother’s headquarters in Bridgewater, New Jersey, and began writing the DTG business plan with a collaborator. After the plan was approved in 1999 by Brother’s top management, I relocated to Bartlett, Tennessee, to work in Brother’s U.S.-based R&D division. Having substantial resources to draw on opened new doors. I brought Dr. Woolf back to develop ink for the Brother printhead, and I was paired with a talented engineer and project manager, Harry Kira, to begin development.
The project started strong. Dr. Woolf made early progress on ink development, even creating a white ink. This was a significant milestone, but unfortunately, he fell ill in early 2001 and had to leave the project.
With that and other changes, we fully shifted the R&D to Brother’s facility in Japan later that year. Working between the U.S. and Japan, Harry and I collaborated with our colleagues overseas to develop a prototype printer. I was deeply honored when the R&D team named it the MAT-1 — which eventually became the Brother GT-541. This machine helped bring DTG to a much wider audience, showing that a technology born in a small shop setting could be successfully scaled into a global product.
Before launch, Brother created several prototype units and placed them with real print shops for an extended period, gathering feedback and ensuring the machines could hold up in actual daily use. This delayed the product launch by many months until 2005, but it was the right call as it verified all our assumptions that this printer would be a hit.
2005 turned out to be a pivotal year for DTG. Several machines were on the market that year alongside the GT-541, including offerings from Kornit, Fast T-Jet, and Mimaki. Of all those that were available at that time, only Brother and Kornit remain in the DTG market today.
The GT-541 was a genuine success. Even without white ink capability, it sold well for many years. A few years after this launch, I left Brother to pursue other interests, but returned in 2009, just in time to work with Harry again on the GT-3 project. That was Brother’s first single-platen CMYK and white DTG printer, and it came close to the original vision I’d had for many years. After the GT-3 launched, I stayed on mainly in marketing and sales-related roles until leaving in late 2013.
From there, in 2014, I moved into a business development role at Epson America, where I helped shape the company’s approach to DTG as both a technology and a growing market. Along the way, people in the industry started calling me the “Godfather of DTG.” I won’t pretend that doesn’t mean something to me; decades of sustained work in a field earn a kind of recognition that’s hard to replicate any other way.
Present work: Sticker Mule
In late 2024, I joined Sticker Mule as director of quality and efficiency. I’d always wanted to work for a DTG printing company, and at this point in my career I’m happy to say that I’m able to pick and choose. Sticker Mule turned out to be a great fit. They have their own internal R&D department, and I get to work alongside genuinely innovative engineers every day. The owner of Sticker Mule is a true visionary and believes that innovation is the key to success. For anyone familiar with my background, it’s less of a new direction and more of a natural continuation.
The core mission has stayed the same throughout my career: making high-quality, customized printing more accessible and more efficient, regardless of order size. The principles I developed while solving the short-run problem in 1996 are still directly relevant to the work I do today, and they’re exactly what we’re applying as we build out our Sticker Mule DTG operation with in-house automation and engineering.
I’m especially proud that Sticker Mule is also launching a fully American-made T-shirt line. It’s a project that combines everything I care about: quality, efficiency, and a commitment to building things the right way.
A flyer for the GT-541, which made its trade show debut in 2005.
What comes next: The future of DTG
I was honored to receive the Joe Clarke Innovator Award at PRINTING United Expo in 2024, and in 2026 I was inducted into the Ben Franklin Honor Society. I value these recognitions not just personally, but as a reflection of how far the DTG industry has come since that first machine rolled out of a small shop in Florida.
After three decades watching this technology evolve into a globally recognized printing category, I’m more optimistic about DTG’s future than I’ve been in years. The trends I see shaping the next chapter are ones I’ve been thinking about for a long time.
Automation is the biggest. The shops pulling ahead today aren’t just buying better machines; they’re engineering their entire workflow, from pretreatment to curing, so that human touchpoints are reduced and efficiency is increased.
Ink chemistry is advancing in parallel, with formulations that are more vibrant, more durable, and friendlier to a wider range of fabric blends, including the performance and synthetic fabrics that have largely stayed out of DTG’s reach.
Sustainability is no longer just a selling point. Being a “green” process is becoming a baseline expectation, and DTG’s low-waste, on-demand model is genuinely well positioned to meet it.
And the on-demand economy itself keeps growing, pushing brands and retailers toward smaller, faster, more personalized runs — exactly the kind of work DTG was invented to handle. The fundamental problem I set out to solve many years ago hasn’t changed. What has changed is how much better we’re getting at solving it.
Early press release on the “Revolution” DTG printer.
Reflections on 30 years
Thirty years on, DTG printing is a well-established part of the decorated apparel world, used by shops of every size across the globe. I’m incredibly proud, not only of creating this machine, but of watching my invention change people’s lives around the world.
Think about what DTG really represents — beyond the patent, beyond the machine, beyond the printing process. It’s more than just a machine. It’s a way to pay off a mortgage, put food on the table, give your kids a quality education, and build something for your family. That’s what makes it truly special. And it’s a wonderful thing that, even 30 years later, this technology continues to make a real difference in people’s lives.
A thank-you to the community
None of this happened in isolation, and I’d be doing the story a disservice if I didn’t acknowledge that. Thirty years of DTG history belongs just as much to the sellers, manufacturers, and repair techs who kept machines running, and to the print shop owners — big and small — the suppliers, and the machine operators who turned a new technology into a livelihood. It belongs to the designers who made the output worth printing, the trade show organizers who gave this community a place to gather, the magazine writers who documented it all, and the shirt suppliers and online retailers who got the product into people’s hands.
To everyone who has built a career, a business, or family around this technology, thank you. I invented a machine. You turned it into an industry.
Matthew Rhome, a DTG industry pioneer, launched the first commercially available DTG Printer, “Revolution,” obtaining the first U.S. Patent for DTG printer technology. With over 45 years in garment decoration, his contributions greatly influenced DTG’s success at Brother International and Epson America. Matthew has excelled in printer technology, business ownership, invention, and equipment design.
