There was BIG news last month (not including Kyocera and Xerox): one of the major Japanese manufacturers, Konica Minolta, announced a new product to enhance inkjet printing on textiles. The word came from Japan via the Domo Report weekly newsletter from Stramaglio Consulting LLC.
In Volume No. 167, dated August 1, 2025, a lead article supports everything we have been saying about the future of textile printing in our industry. The story comes courtesy of OA Life, one of the most popular publications in Japan covering the office technology industry. The opening paragraph reads:
“Konica Minolta introduces ‘O’ROBE,’ Japan’s first inline pretreatment ink for reactive dyes, enabling simultaneous printing and pretreatment. It reduces energy use, chemical waste, and processing steps—enhancing sustainability and profitability for textile printers using the Nassenger inkjet system.”
This news comes directly from Domo with Hiro Ueda and Mike Stramaglio’s permission. To read the whole article, entitled “Streamlining Textile Printing,” you’ll need to subscribe, but what we can share is this: activity is occurring that points to a potential boom market for print.
By way of background, Konica Minolta developed the NASSENGER inkjet textile printer and launched it in 2015. The single-path technology now offers pre-inline treatment, eliminating pretreatment of the whole fabric. This development shortens the entire process. The only drawback is that the OEM does not have an infrastructure in the United States, which is why we have been saying that companies such as Konica Minolta will go directly to their existing U.S. dealer partners to introduce these groundbreaking products. In other words, they will be offering their existing production and industrial printer dealers an amazing opportunity to build manufacturing in the United States.
The NASSENGER 8 employs a new inkjet printhead (lower image) developed by Konica Minolta. It can be equipped with either 16 inkjet heads with 1,024 nozzles in two rows of eight colors (18 printheads in nine colors as an option), or 32 printheads in four rows of nine colors (option for 36 printheads in nine colors).
The OEM will be bringing on products that will require distribution around the globe. In Konica Minolta’s case, they have owned a textile printing company in Italy for at least 10 years. It means when the products are released, they will become immediately available in the Pacific Rim and in European Union countries, including Italy.
There is limited textile printing going on presently in the massive United States’ marketplace. However, there are realization signs that there is a burgeoning opportunity to sell print. With our dealer network here, the logistics are in place.
Three OEMs and Counting in Textile Printing
In addition to Konica Minolta, Kyocera and Ricoh also are active in the textile printing segment. If you are a dealer currently selling production print products manufactured by those three companies, you represent the initial distribution for their textile solutions, in my opinion.
The Cannata Report has been proclaiming that textile printing is the next wave for our industry – should dealers choose to climb on board and make that investment. My sources tell me that Konica Minolta was prepared to make some noise in 2019-20. The machines were already in the U.S. warehouse. But when COVID hit, the writing was on the wall, and they had to ship back those machines. The losses all the manufacturers endured during the pandemic made it impossible to launch such an ambitious undertaking in the United States.
Moving forward, there are analysts who believe the U.S. market for textile printing in 2034 will hit $5 billion. We have stated that it has the potential to reach that number by 2030. So much will depend on when will we see these new textile printers in the United States. Based on our latest analysis, it is more likely that it will take until late 2026 or early 2027 before we see the manufacturers introducing those new textile printers in our country, in which case my projection will fall short. However, we can realistically look at 2032 as seeing the distribution in place to reach that $5 billion objective.
Dealer owners know they need to continue to improve profitability by finding new “rivers” of revenue. Please, I urge you to take this textile opportunity seriously because it will demonstrate clearly and definitively that copier/print dealers are an excellent choice to satisfy demand for those new products. We remain overly optimistic about the future in our industry because the organizations currently existing on the production print distribution side are excellent. The manufacturers know this, and ultimately what will benefit them is bringing their distribution along as they expand their offerings into a much more profitable arena for both.
Diversification has become somewhat of a “dirty word” among dealers in the channel, perhaps because they’ve grown so tired of hearing about it! But enlarging or varying the range of products or the field of operation of your business is essential to improving profitability. That never has been more apparent than when we tallied the responses of the 415 dealers who participated in our 40th Annual Dealer Survey this summer. Detailed breakdowns of those results are coming soon!
