We’ll soon be offering UV printing on our restraints. This is big.
We’ve constantly been asked by customers about ways we can customise their Biothane® cuffs and collars, and the other stuff we make. If you’re getting something you’ll have locked on to you all day, it’s understandable that you’d want it to be just right. For months, we’ve offered our heat transfer vinyl service, where we can apply a wide range of colourful vinyl designs to our restraint straps, and although they’ve been popular and well-received, we have some upgrades in the works.
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We are currently expecting to be able to offer UV printing from mid-August 2026*.
Why the change?
Vinyl is limiting.
Applying vinyl to Biothane straps is a laborious and difficult process. To control dust and other contaminants, we need to completely clean the workshop from top to bottom before starting. Because Biothane® is rounded at the edges, we are limited in the coverage we can offer, and both the top and bottom edges can’t be pressed to, which makes some designs infeasible. After approving the designs with a customer, we ready them for cutting, where we set up our drag-knife cutting machine to cut the design. Once it finishes its role, we “weed” the vinyl by hand, which involves peeling away the excess vinyl so only the intended design remains. For complex designs, this is an unforgiving process, and requires extreme care. We prepare the straps too, beginning with a degreasing process, treatment with an adhesion promoter chemical and a final blast with compressed air to banish any last dust. Carefully lining up the designs with laser-projected alignment points, we tape down the vinyl and put it through multiple stages of heat press treatment.
The problem is that each colour requires almost this entire process to be restarted, and the level of detail we can achieve is pretty low compared to the alternatives. When multiple colours are used, we need to stack layers, which adds tiny errors in alignment which can compound, especially on larger designs. We can only press about 40cm of strapping at a time, and because Biothane® is so lovely and soft, we can only do one strap at once. We’ve kept our vinyl pressing costs extremely low given the amount of time it takes! Although we’re proud and very pleased with our vinyl designs to date, we’re about to move a few rungs up the technology ladder.
We’re gluttons for punishment, sure, but…
…the problem is, Biothane® is too good at what it does. Each colour combination (strap colour plus vinyl colour/style) requires individual calibration and testing to get great results, and applying vinyl is a delicate dance between getting good adhesion and avoiding damaging the straps. Our straps are extremely resilient; they tolerate pretty much anything you’ll throw at them in your daily life, and that comes from the material’s innate ability to reject odours, stains and, well, adhesives.
If you try applying designs to Biothane® yourself, you will discover that it melts well below the recommended temperatures for many types of heat transfer vinyl. Additionally, it needs careful protection from the heat it can withstand, and although these temperatures are well in excess of 100°C, they can be tricky to get good results from with HTV. However, we designed a process that resulted in great outcomes in almost every case, but with prolonged use and heavy wear, vinyl just wants to delaminate from Biothane®. This is particularly true for reflective and holographic variants, and for really small details. Some colour of Biothane® just despise vinyl, like certain neon varieties, and we’ve had to really dip into our bucket of tricks to make those colours bond well. We’ve done a lot of work to absolutely minimise the visibility of heat treatment’s effects on Biothane®, but on darker straps, it’s sometimes unavoidable that the texture is a little different on the parts that have been squished in the heat press. Our equipment is high-end and we use it carefully, but the materials are just not the best match.
We want you to be worry-free with your designs
When you get your carefully crafted designs from us, we want you to be confident they’re not going anywhere. We’ve done the maths and the reported failure rate of vinyl designs to date is around 3%, which is pretty great for the material, but we’re not happy with that. With our new equipment, you’ll not have to worry about your fingernails getting caught under the edges of your pet’s name, because there’ll be no edges to catch.
UV printing completely solves these fragility problems, and we’re confident that after months of work with experienced UV printing professionals, we’ve now got both the knowledge and the contacts to pull of something much better than vinyl.
So, what’s UV printing?
You may have already seen UV-printed Biothane®…
…because we’ve been selling it for over a year! Our very popular Pastel Paws design, available on our cuffs, collars and locking waist belts, features edge-to-edge UV printing in full colour. That’s just a sneak peak of what will be available.
…but what is it and what can it do?
UV printing is, at its core, just a really fancy inkjet printer. The equipment is very different (and a lot more expensive), but it involves firing tiny droplets of ink onto what you want to print on. Then, an ultra-violet lamp (that’s there the UV name comes in) and cures the special inks, permanently bonding them to most surfaces. Chances are, you’ve seen plenty of UV-printed items in your time, because it’s used for countless applications in industry and consumer goods.
UV-printing on Biothane® is an understood science, and although it’s not common, we’ve been working with those with years of experience to make sure we’ll get it right. The results are outstanding, and are more than tough enough to deal with any of the abuse you lot give our restraints.
What are the benefits?
The upsides to UV printing over heat transfer vinyl for our restraints are almost too numerous to list. Here’s a quick run-down:
Full-colour CYMKW printing
No matter how detailed your idea, we’ll be able to bring it to life. The texture of Biothane® hides the absolute tiniest of details a little, but we’ll be printing with an effective resolution of over 600 dots per inch.
We can print with the usual CYMK (cyan, yellow, magenta and black) inks, plus white, and some special inks you’ll read about in a moment! This combination means we can print pretty much any colour design on any colour strap. All the inks are highly flexible, so they won’t peel or delaminate, no matter what kinks you get them into.
True edge-to-edge printing
A huge limitation of vinyl is you can’t press against rounded edges. If you somehow manage to, they’re immediately vulnerable to peeling away and delamination. UV printing does not have this limitation at all, and we’ll be happily able to print your designs across the entire visible band if you wish! We’ll also be offering inner surface printing, which was a particularly difficult ask with vinyl, so if you fancy some hidden messages for your sub only they can see when they put their collar on, we’ll be more than happy to oblige. This example photo is of pre-made UV-printed Biothane® from our supplier showing full colour on a white strap. We’ll be offering this sort of detail (better, actually) on every colour of strap we offer, including the versions with reflective stripes!
Special inks & effects
That icon was stolen by the AI creeps but we’re stealing it back. From launch, we’ll be able to offer some special inks and effects for your restraints:
Neons
That’s right, just like our neon cuffs themselves, we’ll be able to print with special fluorescent inks to bring your designs to life at the party. Can be used to add highlights to your image, or make vibrant colours pop even more.
Varnish
Your beautiful designs don’t need any protection, but if you’d like a specific finish sheen, like a gloss or matte surface, our varnish inks will be able to achieve just that. Plus, if you’d like the most subtle option for some text, you can go without colour altogether and just get gloss on its own, which will give a beautiful low-profile effect that needs just the right light to read.
Textured finishes
By default, the lovely texture of the base Biothane® will shine through, but if you prefer, we can apply multiple layers of varnish ink to achieve a custom textured finish! Excellent if you’d love to incorporate a tactile element to your design, or add hidden codes or touch points. We’ll be experimenting to see just how thick we can do, but a few millimetres has been tested already by our friends in the US.
Foils
Coming later, once we prove the longevity of the results, we’ll hopefully be offering reflective foils for spot metallic effects. Ever seen a leather product with shiny printed details? That’s it!
Durable and washable longevity
UV printing is the longest lasting way to put designs like these onto Biothane® materials, and just like the pre-made UV-printed designs we already sell, our custom UV printing will be suitable for all the abuse you people throw at our restraints already. There’s no edge to peel away at, so unless you’re taking 80 grit sandpaper to your cuffs for some reason, your designs are there to stay.
When will this be available?
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We are currently expecting to be able to offer UV printing from mid-August 2026.
*We’ve paid for our printer already, and we expect to receive it in August 2026, but this may be pushed back a little depending on shipping logistics etc. We hope to be providing UV printing services from mid-August 2026. If this date changes, we’ll update this page as soon as we know.
This page was last updated on the 25th of July, 2026.
Can I change my vinyl order to UV printed?
If you’ve ordered vinyl printing for your restraints and we haven’t shipped them to you yet, you’re very welcome to wait to get it UV printed instead! We’d recommend it, in fact. Of course, it’ll need to wait until we have the UV printer and have it all set up and dialled in, but you’ll be the first to get your goodies when we do! If you’d like to, please get in touch with your order number and let us know. However, we’ll be asking everyone who has ordered vinyl designs whether they’d like to wait for the new process, so don’t stress about reaching out if you’re busy.
We’ll still be offering vinyl designs for those who really want them, and will still be using our careful techniques to make them great, but for the vast majority of people, we’d recommend going with UV printing.
We’re not outwardly offering UV printing services to order until we launch fully, though. To use the fancy new customisation tool we’ve built, you’ll have to wait a little.
How will this affect the cost of getting designs?
We’ve kept our vinyl pressing service artificially cheap until now, and because it’s so popular, it’s proving more and more difficult to maintain these prices. However, UV printing’s advantages will make it much easier for us to apply designs in bulk and ensure greater quality control across orders, so we’ll be keeping our prices as they have been for the foreseeable future. It’ll also mean if you ask for custom designs, you’ll not have to wait as long to get them, provided you have your artwork or ideas ready!
For those who do want vinyl after we shift to UV printing, we’ll offer this as a custom service, meaning it’ll be billed per hour of labour. It’ll be significantly more expensive, and vinyl application will be subject to our custom product warranty, not our more broad and generous standard warranty. Neither change affects those who order vinyl designs before we officially launch our UV printing service.
What do I need to do to prepare artwork for printing?
We’ll have detailed instructions for this up soon! If you’d like something like we currently offer (simple text, symbols, QR codes etc), just provide these to us however you’d like. If you’d like to prepare full-colour images, and especially full-coverage artwork which extends right to the edge of the straps, please prepare artwork in a suitable CYMK colourspace, at 1,200 dots per inch resolution, at the exact height you want (eg 19.0mm for cuffs, 25.0mm for collars etc) with a 3mm bleed allowance. We’ll contact these customers when we start our UV printing service regardless to provide proofs of the prints before we commit them to your restraints! From launch, we’ll be able to print continuous artwork up to 420mm in length, but we are neck-deep in designs for making roll-to-roll printing possible, so full coverage, uninterrupted longer prints are coming! At launch, if you need something longer, we’ll do our best to make it the length you need, though!
Will you be able to print on… other stuff?
It’ll not just be Biothane®, my friend! We are already making jigs for printing on other things we make, including product housings, keys and Segufix® accessories. The world is your oyster, and we’ll be offering customisation for many more products once we launch our UV printing service.
Can you print on something in bulk for me?
Maybe! We are hoping to offer a for-perverts-by-perverts printing service in the future, especially for other creators using leather and Biothane® etc who’d like to get some custom designs for their offerings. If you’re interested, get in touch.
Still want to know more?
If you’ve still got other questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!