Piero La Puca’s story is not only one of a manager and his brands, but also that of a crucial chapter in the evolution of printing techniques. The background here is not just workshops, shops and fairs, but even the aircraft carrier Nimitz. In fact, the Campania-born entrepreneur cut his teeth in the industry when he was still a teenager, starting to sell customised silkscreen printed and embroidered T-shirts in the 1980s to American soldiers stationed in Italy or transiting the Mediterranean aboard star-studded military ships. It takes Hot Stuff to impress guys like that; in fact, that is exactly what La Puca would decide a few years later to call his first brand, taking full advantage of the properties of heat transfer.

Such circumstances brought him into contact with the most advanced technologies from overseas; thus, in the early 1990s, La Puca was an important customer of Hanes and Fruit of the Loom who were garment giants of the time. Silk-screen printing with its production times and minimums, however, was beginning to get to him: it was at this time that La Puca discovered that there were active companies in the USA producing silk-screen transfers, i.e. decals that could be applied by a press in a matter of seconds, with a quality result that was extraordinary by the standards of the time. This was the turning point: it was 1993 when La Puca brings this technology to Italy: “I introduced to our country the possibility of applying a ready-made sheet onto a T-shirt for ten seconds by means of a heat press, obtaining a three-dimensional, swelling print from it, with effects that screen printing at the time was unable to achieve.

At the same time, the T-Shirt Makers brand was also created, with the opening of more than 20 franchise shops throughout Italy, where it was possible to create one's own customised T-shirt or sweatshirt on the spot.

The wheels set in motion by La Puca are very big, bigger than himself, his entrepreneurial skills at the time and his funds: he thus decides after some time to turn to distribution. At the end of the 1990s-beginning of the new millennium, the new, big disruption occurs: the development of sublimation printing on objects with the help of even small modified desktop printers, parallel to the analogue-digital paradigm shift in photography, now makes it possible to apply an image to a much wider range of products, one piece at a time. Puca is once again pioneering this new technology in our part of the world: "Sublimation has opened up a new galaxy to the world of customisation, hitherto confined within two dimensions: that of 3D and, along with it, a remarkable variety of materials and objects, from mugs to metal key rings etc.".

The rest is recent history, with T-Shirt Makers and, starting in the last two years, the new brand Customate (‘the friend of customisation’) becoming virtuoso practitioners of cutting-edge technologies such as DTG - Direct to Garment, DTF - Direct to Film and DTV UV, which Piero La Puca considers to be the 'next big thing' on the horizon: “DTF UV will open up a market of users who can print products themselves- using new-generation, ultra-high-strength 3D contoured adhesives, they will no longer need to print at a shop."

Needless to say, in an environment that is sensitive not only to price but also, and perhaps above all, to specialisation, La Puca's Pozzuoli-based, 18-strong team has a relatively easy time carving out market share: “We sell machines and do after-sales service, selection and technology testing in our own laboratory that acts as a service to retailers," explains the CEO, who points out: “So if a retailer wants to try a new technology but is not sure, we offer them the opportunity to try producing small quantities quickly, to see if that technology might have a market for them.

In short, a taste of the future. As on board the Nimitz...