Digital is coming for screen printing's volume, and the industry is consolidating faster than it prints.

Recent developments

Nine stories defining 2025–2026

Consolidation Printful + Printify + Snow Commerce = FYUL

The merger of late 2024 got its shared name on Nov 25, 2025. All three brands keep their own storefronts and services; what changes is who owns them. The team is moving into FYUL House, a 9,000 sqm pair of buildings in Riga (nearly 97,000 sq ft), with the relocation due to finish in Q1 2026 under CEO Alex Saltonstall. One company now runs both an in-house factory network and a third-party partner network.

Sources: ASI · Dead Pixels Society · Print Monthly

Hardware Kornit Atlas MATRIX: DTG and DTF in one machine

Premiered at Konnections (Apr 12, 2026), commercially available since May 19, 2026, ahead of FESPA Barcelona. 150 imp/h on cotton, 98 on polyester, a 90×60 cm print area, a native DTF mode (Karbon Transfer) and single-step printing on blends. The global beta ran at customers in Europe and North America. “We are already shifting meaningful polyester production volumes to Atlas MATRIX,” said Frederik Huhn, director of global fulfillment at Spread Group, in the May 19 availability release.

Sources: GlobeNewswire · Kornit · WhatTheyThink · TexIntel (specs)

Hardware The Apollo's nearest rival is four years old

M&R launched Polaris in February 2022: a digital carousel with two print engines, one white and one CMYK, 16 Ricoh printheads each, an on-board pretreater, and the durability of the STRYKER oval press married to the print engines of the DS-4000 Digital Squeegee. Image area up to 38.1 × 48.3 cm. Four years on it is still the closest thing to a rival the Apollo has — Printweek, reviewing the Apollo, wrote that “we haven’t found anything else that’s a direct competitor”. Nobody has entered this throughput class since, which says more about the segment than a launch would.

Sources: TexIntel · M&R · M&R (Polaris specs) · Printweek

Trade The end of de minimis: a blow to the Temu/Shein model

The US closed the de minimis customs exemption for China on May 2, 2025, and globally on Aug 29, 2025. Direct-from-China parcels lost their cost advantage, a relative boost for locally produced POD in the US and Europe.

Source: CNBC · CBP

Business model Kornit sells "clicks", not machines

The AIC (All-Inclusive Click) model, which bundles machine, service and ink into a per-print price, grew +112% YoY; ARR $33.8M (+79%). A full 60% of systems sold in Q2’26 went to traditional screen-printing shops. Digital has stopped being a supplement to screen and started replacing it.

Source: Kornit IR

Platforms Etsy tightens the rules, Amazon cuts royalties

Etsy’s Creativity Standards update (Jun 10, 2025) requires anything made on a laser cutter, 3D printer, CNC or Cricut to come from the seller’s own design; other people’s templates are out, and the allowance for digital files of scanned vintage content was dropped. From Jun 1, 2026 Amazon Merch pays US-store royalties in three groups, set by the share of units sold through traffic Amazon identifies as seller-driven; ads placed on Amazon count, not only off-site traffic. Below the 15% threshold a seller is in the Creator group, at half the Plus rate. The era of passive uploading is ending.

Sources: Value Added Resource · Merch Titans · Amazon Merch on Demand

Automation THG Fulfil: 430 Libiao sorting robots

430 T-Sort robots went into the automated Manchester warehouse, operational from September 2025: capacity up about 75%, to roughly 1M units a day, with sorting accuracy quoted up to 99.9%. An earlier install of 80 robots at THG Fulfil had already taken a site capped at 250K sortation units a day to 600K. Capacity here follows robot count rather than conveyor length, which is the whole argument for swarm sortation.

Sources: THG press release · THG blog · Parcel and Postal Technology International

Regulation Textile EPR has become EU law

The revised Waste Framework Directive, Directive (EU) 2025/1892, entered into force on Oct 16, 2025. It gives Member States two hard dates rather than two windows: transposition by Jun 17, 2027 (Article 2), and extended producer responsibility schemes for textiles and footwear established by Apr 17, 2028 (Article 22a(14)), with fees eco-modulated on durability and recyclability. Anyone selling apparel in the EU will pay for its end of life.

Source: European Commission

Software Kornit buys PrintFactory — a machine maker moves into software

Announced on Apr 12, 2026, the acquisition gives Kornit cloud-based color and production management for mixed fleets, a signal that margin is moving from iron to the orchestration layer. In the same vein: Caldera is unifying its RIP portfolio, and Hybrid Software is showing the first GPU-native industrial RIP.

Sources: GlobeNewswire · Hybrid Software

Watch: the machines behind the stories

Video Industrial DTG & hybrids

• Kornit Apollo — official walkthrough Kornit Digital
• Apollo at T-Shirt & Sons — customer case Kornit Digital
• Kornit Atlas MATRIX — launch video Kornit Digital
• M&R Polaris in action M&R
• M&R DS-4000 Digital Squeegee — screen+digital hybrid M&R
• Brother GTX600 — production tour Brother
• Brother DTRX — 2-minute hype video Brother
• Aeoon Kyo — industrial DTG Aeoon

Video DTF, automation & events

• Mimaki TRAPIS — two-step pigment transfer Mimaki Europe
• ROQ IMPRESS + FEED — automated DTF application ROQ US
• Libiao — swarm sorting robots Libiao
• Libiao — large B2B platform deployment Libiao
• Exotec Skypod — system overview Exotec
• FESPA 2026 Barcelona — official highlights FESPA
• PRINTING United 2025 — recap Print Monthly*

* trade-press channel; all other links are official vendor/event channels. Links open on YouTube/Vimeo — this page embeds no third-party media.