What is Strike-off?
Also known as: Sample print, Test print
A small physical print of a textile design produced before committing to a full production run. Used to verify color, registration, scale, and seamlessness on the actual fabric.
In detail
A strike-off is the textile industry's equivalent of a software staging environment. The designer sends the production file to the print partner, who produces a 1-yard or 1-meter sample on the actual fabric base intended for production. The strike-off catches errors that the digital file does not show: color drift across the seam zone, visible seams that emerge under printing pressure, registration mismatches in screen-printed designs, motif distortion at tile boundaries, and DPI mismatches that produce blurry output. Strike-offs cost $20-100 typically; production runs cost hundreds to thousands. Always order a strike-off before approving a production run — fixing problems at strike-off is cheap; fixing them in production is expensive. Some designers keep a portfolio of approved strike-offs as physical reference for color consistency across reorders.
Example
A designer approves a digital file showing a coral floral. The strike-off comes back with the coral printing 30% more orange than expected — the designer adjusts the file's color space mapping and re-runs the strike-off, this time matching to commercial tolerance.