Kaumagraph International has been manufacturing heat applied textiles for the medical apparel market for decades. Our transfers are used on scrubs and re-usable isolation gowns for property marking and quality control grids. The benefit of a Kaumagraph transfer is the ink itself. The ink will survive over 100x washes in the medical laundries. In recent years, hospitals in the US and Europe have moved to a more disposable solution due to the inexpensive cost of importing from Asia. The recent pandemic involving Covid-19 has changed the way hospital gowns, scrubs and linens are sourced.
Since the Covid-19 outbreak began in China, the immediate need for isolation gowns and an increase in use of scrubs was primarily in China and surrounding countries. Quickly, these countries bought up the accumulated inventory and orders filled the capacity of the factories making the goods. As the virus moved to the West first in Europe and then to the US, it quickly caused a shortage of PPE globally. Suddenly there was a new need for re-usable PPE that could be sent to a medical laundry, cleaned and then re-used 50, 75 or 100x. All of a sudden, property marking and quality control grids were needed to ensure the hospitals received their correct gowns and linens back. Quality control grids are now needed because the laundry must mark the number of times a gown is washed before it loses its rating to protect the wearer from contamination.
At Kaumagraph, we quickly needed to transition from producing for a number of different markets to prioritizing the medical apparel marks. Orders of greater size and a more urgent delivery date began to come in. Proudly, we have been able to keep up with the demand and continue to do so as the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic escalates.