There's a question I get asked fairly regularly, usually from someone who's just discovered that their company's custom ties were produced using a print process rather than a woven one. The question goes something like this: "Does that make them less special? Less legitimate?" And I always find it a fascinating entry point into a conversation about how the tie industry actually works — because the honest answer reveals something that surprises most people. The vast majority of printed ties in circulation aren't catalogue items sitting on a shelf somewhere. They're custom ties, designed specifically for a client, carrying colours, logos, and patterns that belong exclusively to that organisation.

To understand why this is the case, it helps to think about who actually orders printed ties and why. Back in the day, when South African companies first began developing strong corporate identities — I would say the real push came through the 1970s and 1980s as local businesses matured and professionalised — the necktie became one of the primary vehicles for expressing institutional belonging. Schools wanted their house colours represented. Banks wanted their branding carried into every client meeting. Sports clubs wanted something members could wear with genuine pride. None of these organisations were looking for something generic. They wanted something that was theirs, and theirs alone. That demand is essentially the origin story of the custom ties market in this part of the world.

What a lot of people don't realise is that printing technology, far from being a shortcut or a compromise, opened the door to an extraordinary level of design freedom. Woven ties are magnificent — don't get me wrong, a beautifully woven custom tie with a complex repeating motif is one of the finest things a manufacturer can produce — but the weaving process has inherent constraints around colour gradients, fine detail, and the minimum quantities that make production economically viable. Printing, particularly with the advances in digital and sublimation techniques these days, allows for photographic detail, intricate logo work, and crisp typography in ways that weaving simply cannot match. For a school needing fifty custom ties with a detailed crest, or a company wanting a tie that precisely mirrors its corporate colour palette, printing is often not just the practical choice but the genuinely superior one.

At Vinuchi, we see this play out constantly. When a client comes to us for printed ties, they almost never arrive with a request for something off-the-shelf. They arrive with a brief. They have a pantone reference for their brand colour. They have a logo file. They have an opinion about the stripe width or the repeat pattern on the background. They are, in every meaningful sense of the word, commissioning custom ties — the print process is simply the method we use to bring their vision to life with the precision it deserves. One could say that printed and custom are, in the South African corporate and institutional market at least, nearly synonymous terms.

I think the confusion arises because people associate printed ties with the cheaper end of the market — the kind of novelty ties with cartoon characters or festive patterns that you'd find in a chain retailer. And yes, those exist, and yes, they're printed. But that's a very small corner of a much larger picture. The corporate tie sitting on the chest of a financial services executive, the school tie worn with pride at one of our long-established independent schools, club ties presented to a member at a formal dinner — these are all, in many cases, printed ties that were designed and produced as genuine custom ties with real thought, real craft, and real meaning behind them.

What excites me about where the industry is heading is that the boundary between the print and weave worlds continues to blur in interesting ways. Hybrid techniques, improved fabric substrates, and more sophisticated finishing processes mean that a well-made printed tie these days can carry the weight and drape of something that feels genuinely luxurious. The best tie manufacturers — and I would distinguish those from mere tie makers, because the difference in approach and outcome is significant — are investing in that craft regardless of the production method. For custom ties specifically, the future is one where the client's vision is the only real constraint, and that's a rather exciting place to be.