UV printing service
Our UV printing service is now available!
After months of work and careful preparation, we’re excited to launch our new UV printing service, which allows almost limitless possibilities for designs to be printed onto all our restraints! UV printing is the gold standard for getting durable, detailed designs onto Biothane® straps, and our workshop equipment now includes a dedicated UV printer just for putting the designs you perverts come up with onto your restraints. In addition, we’ve built a new configurator tool for designing your own prints in your browser, and we’ll be gradually rolling out the configurator tool to all our made-to-measure products.
Take a look below for the wide range of printing capabilities we now have, and click any of the big glowing buttons to get started with designing!
Full colour printing in precisely the palette you want, with no limit on gradients, palette or mixing.
Full compatibility with our neon line, with full coverage available on every type of strap.
Vibrant gloss varnish, exactly where you want it
Narrow lines and hair-thin patterns are vibrant and durable
Extremely small isolated points are just as strong as full-coverage prints
Hazard striping and sturdy block patterns in any colour you desire
What can we print?
Our UV printing service is highly capable and can provide a wide range of colours, effects, finishes and detail.
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’re 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, fluorescent red and yellow, and finally clear varnishes. 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.
Cyan
Yellow
Magenta
Black
The standard colours you find in your home printer are available via our UV printing service. Each ink is flexible and conforms perfectly to the twisting and curving of the Biothane® straps. These inks create a standard CYMK colour gamut, accurate to G7 Master certification.
Flexible White
Most smaller-scale UV printers use rigid white ink due to the pigments inside, which can lead to cracking when used on flexible materials like Biothane®. Our service uses specialised flexible whites designed to flex just as well as the other colours.
True edge-to-edge printing
We can print across the full width of your restraints, meaning when you wear them, full-coverage designs completely span the whole strap.
Special inks & effects
That icon was stolen by the AI creeps but we’re stealing it back. We offer some special inks and effects for your restraints:
Neons
That’s right, just like our neon cuffs themselves, we can print with special fluorescent inks to bring your designs to life at the party. These can be used to add highlights to your image, or make vibrant colours pop even more, achieving a wider colour gamut than standard CYMK ranges.
Fluorescent Red
Fluorescent Yellow
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 can achieve just that, over the full design or just in particular areas to add a shiny highlight. 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.
Varnish
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. Heavily textured prints may be subject to a small additional materials cost.
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 are 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.
The same cost no matter how detailed
No matter how complex design, as long as you provide your artwork, all prints are the same price as any other. There are some small fees for very large textured prints, and if you need us to assemble artwork for you that takes a long time, but we’ll always agree these with you first, and they apply to a tiny percentage of designs.
Definable tactile results
Many of our customers have had very specific requests for how their designs do or don’t affect the tactile feel of their restraints, and with vinyl designs, the final texture was take it or leave it. With UV printing, we can precisely modulate the final feel of your restraints under your fingertips, meaning designs lie completely flat and reveal the texture of the underlying Biothane®, or they’re pleasingly raised so you can feel the patterns as you hold them.
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 colours 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.
Frequently asked questions
These FAQs were put together before we launched the UV printing service, but we’re leaving the ones relevant to pre-launch up for a while just in case previous browsers need to check back.
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.
Will I be prioritised if I wait for UV printing?
Yes, existing customers who opt to wait for our UV printing service to be ready will be prioritised so that they get their goodies as soon as possible, especially after patiently waiting. We will not be publicly offering our UV printing service to new customers until all customers with finalised artwork that opted to wait have had their printing applied.
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!
Additionally, our move to UV printing means you’ll no longer be charged for highly complex designs, because we no longer need to spend hours and hours applying them painstakingly by hand!
Will there be pre-made options available?
If you like our existing UV-printed offering of Rainbow Paws and fancy getting something similar but don’t want to design your own from scratch, don’t worry! We’re hard at work on a selection of pre-made printed options, including full-coverage symbols and text, pride flags, fur patterns and more. You’ll be able to choose these just like our existing UV-printed option, and even better? It’ll cost you less than our current offering!
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 custom 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.
Will I still be able to get vinyl designs applied in future?
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 will offer more restricted design options, limited to simple text and symbols in two colours at most.
For those who still 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. As a result, it will be significantly more expensive, and vinyl application will be subject to our custom product warranty, not our more broad and generous standard warranty.
What do I need to do to prepare artwork for printing?
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 check out our setup guide. We also have templates to get you started!
We’ll contact 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! In the meantime, we will be able to apply designs to straps of unlimited length, but designs should be forgiving of slight alignment give at these 420mm increments. At launch, if you need something longer, we’ll do our best to make it the length you need, though!
These pricing and availability changes do not affect those who order vinyl designs before we officially launch our UV printing service.
Can I use artwork I didn’t make on my restraints?
If you have consent, sure! We take steps to make sure any artists whose works are printed on our restraints give explicit consent beforehand, and give them significant control to make sure they’re comfortable with what’s printed.
Still want to know more?
If you’ve still got other questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!