Hydro Water-Based Ink

High-Quality Water-Based Printing

When it comes to custom T-shirts, it’s the ink that makes all the difference.  At Marathon Sportswear, we are revolutionizing the screen-printing industry one shirt at a time. With decades of experience printing more than 100 million shirts, we’ve developed a water-based printing solution that effectively combats the challenges of many other water based ink methods.

Introducing Marathon’s Hydro Water Base Ink—the screen-printing industry’s best water-based alternative.

Why Hydro?

Marathon Hydro is a proprietary water-based ink that has a much thinner base structure than our plastisol ink base. When mixed with pigments, softeners, reducers and bleaching agents, Hydro not only deposits a much thinner, softer print on our shirts, it also bleaches out the dye color of the garment it’s being printed on. This ensures a brighter print color without the need of a heavy underlay print. This premium ink and printing technique yield a soft, worn, matte look that pairs extremely well with our Vintage Blend Tee, The MSV1980.

Hydro ink is a premium ink and not necessarily the best option for every garment or project.  See below for a quick comparison of our new Hydro water base versus our traditional multi-purpose plastisol base ink.

Plastisol – Industry Standard:

• Bright, vibrant print
• Easy to use, best value
• Ideal for exact PMS color match
• Prints on top of shirt fibers
• Versatile: best or only option for many materials (polyester, nylon) and some garment colors (kelly green, royal blue, purple)

Hydro:

• Premium vintage look and soft feel (feels softer after each wash)
• Muted or matte print
• Holds fine detail
• Best for distressed or worn-out logos
• Penetrates into the shirt fibers
• Ideal ink for Marathon Vintage Tee (MSV1980)
• Limited to certain garment materials (cotton and some cotton blends) and garment colors (bleaching process does not work well on kelly green, royal blue or purple)