After years of providing the highest quality custom apparel and accessories to our beautiful friends and customers in San Luis Obispo and the surrounding central coast of California, Ecoprintworks came about when its founders David Whitaker and Peter Imai decided to make a change in philosophy.

We loved our business, says Peter but we wanted to be more responsible with the decisions we were making. To us that meant making a move from PVC based Plastisol inks and conventional cotton to solvent free, water-based inks, and organic cotton garments. It’s a bit more expensive, but the response that we’ve gotten from customers is amazing. We’re happy to be able to provide a healthier work environment for our staff as well as a finished product that falls in line with our values. We hope you love the water-based prints as much as we do.

Deciding to make a change proved easier said than done. Plastisol inks have been the standard in the screen-printing industry for good reason. They are quite easy to work with and provide great color representation. The downside is that they are based off PVC (generally agreed upon as the most environmentally damaging plastic produced) .

Water-based alternatives were out there, and we gave them all a shot. Besides being a very finicky lot, the color opacity was underwhelming to say the least. Furthermore, most contained significant amounts of distillates – negating some of their supposed environmental benefits.

That’s why we were so excited to come across Permaset Aqua – the new 100% solvent free, water-based ink from Permaset – the industry leader of fabric printing inks in Australia for the last 40 years. Not only were our new prints softer to the touch, but they passed the color spectrum tests with flying colors. (Gone too were the noxious fumes that used to permanently occupy the work floor.)

We feel like we’ve discovered something great, and with EcoPrintworks.com we decided take it to the web.

We’re constantly trying to improve what we’re doing, so if you have any thoughts or comments, we’d love to hear from you.

Peter Imai
Owner