Expand Your Transfer Print Brand With Private Label Powder Adhesives

Expand your transfer print brand with private label powder adhesives from Bostik designed to improve DTF performance, efficiency and durability.

As an equipment manufacturer in the direct-to-film (DTF) transfer print market, you know your customers rely on you for more than high-performing printers. They also expect a complete, reliable turnkey system that includes inks, films, coatings and the right powder adhesive technology, working seamlessly together under your brand.

To protect that brand experience, you want to make sure your system’s components can perform consistently and can reduce downstream issues.

That’s where Bostik can support you.

As the adhesives solutions segment of Arkema, we supply high‑performance, hot melt powder adhesives that can integrate into your equipment platform and can be private‑labeled to strengthen your branded system. This means we operate behind your brand to help ensure your system performs consistently — without requiring you to become an adhesive expert or manage a complex materials supply chain.

Learn how you can maintain full ownership of the customer experience while relying on our portfolio and technical expertise to enhance your customers’ end-use product performance, their production efficiencies as well as their adhesive environmental footprint.

How Bostik’s Portfolio Can Offer An Enhanced System For Your Customers

Our solutions are designed to help you address specific needs and evolve with the market and include:

Thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) powder adhesives: They fuse at low temperatures while maintaining softness and flexibility for long-lasting comfort. With the widest material compatibility of our technologies, TPU adhesives are compatible with silicone inks, which can support more sustainable practices by allowing the use of PVC and heavy metal–free ink systems and helping reduce waste through improved durability and less reprints.
Copolyester powder adhesives: These adhesives are known for their excellent adhesion properties; they offer plasticizer and washing resistance to mitigate cracking and help ensure a flexible, soft touch transfer. They also provide fast setting to help streamline operational efficiencies.
Copolyamide powder adhesives: They offer plasticizer and high wash resistance, allowing the material to withstand challenging heat transfer applications including low surface energy textiles. The slick, non‑porous surfaces of low surface energy textiles can be difficult for the adhesive to wet out and create a strong bond; copolyamide powder adhesives can anchor securely and maintain durability through heat, stretch and repeated laundering. This technology also contributes softness and flexibility to the material to enhance the overall feel and comfort.

With multiple hot melt adhesive technologies in our portfolio, you can select the formulations that are suitable to your printer, ink system and application conditions. Further, Bostik’s transfer print portfolio includes OEKO-TEX® certified solutions, helping you save time finding solutions that meet textile industry standards.

How Bostik's Adhesives Improve Your Customers’ End-Use Product Performance

Our powder adhesive technologies are designed to make it easy for you to address specific or evolving performance needs, which can help improve your company’s revenue or your customers’ brand loyalty.

The optimized performance capabilities we offer in our hot melt powder adhesives include:

Low Temperature Activation:
Bostik’s TPU hot melt powder adhesives are thermoplastic, which means they soften when heated and solidify when cooled, including at room temperature; this allows them to provide low activation temperatures to films and inks. This helps achieve:

Material softness and flexibility: Low activation temperatures help decrease the risk of fabric stiffening to maintain the material's natural softness; this is because low heat exposure reduces the chance of over-melting or over-penetrating the adhesive into the fabric structure, thereby mitigating damage likelihood associated with high activation temperatures. This can allow the textile to retain its original feel. Further, Bostik’s TPU powder adhesives are formulated to provide excellent elasticity on a range of materials including fibers, blends, cotton, spandex and more; this makes is easy for your company to offer more customized product options that can easily stretch and move without cracking or peeling.

Wash Durability:
Bostik’s portfolio of copolyester, TPU and copolyamide powder adhesives is formulated to withstand repeated washing cycles.
We understand your transfer print adhesive helps provide the necessary strength and flexibility to prevent the graphic from losing its aesthetic appearance. Our powder adhesives are optimized to provide bond integrity and elasticity through exposure to water, chemical detergents and agitation frequently and repeatedly so that the graphic remains. This includes:

Plasticizer resistance: Both copolyester and copolyamide powder adhesives exhibit low sensitivity to plasticizer migration, which is critical for wash durability. When plasticizers move into the adhesive during washing, they can weaken it, causing softening, swelling or reduced bond strength. Both powder adhesives are highly resistant to softening when exposed to plasticizers from inks, coatings or synthetic fibers during wash cycles. This resistance can help prevent the adhesive layer from breaking down, becoming brittle or losing cohesion over time, helping the print remain intact and avoid cracking.
Elastic bond strength: TPU and copolyamide powder adhesives provide elasticity and cohesive strength, even after repeated wash and dry cycles. Their molecular structures allow the adhesive film to stretch with the textile during movement, then recover without creating stress points at the graphic’s edges. This helps absorb mechanical stress in the wash, maintaining adhesion and prevent cracking or delamination.

As a result, our powder adhesives help the print maintain integrity under washing conditions so the graphic design remains vibrant and intact.

Soft-Hand Feel:
Our TPU or copolyester powder adhesives are designed to integrate well with fabric fibers helping to avoid a rough, “plastic” feel that may otherwise cause a textile to seem unbreathable and, as a result, be less desirable for your high-quality apparel needs. Their formulations incorporate flexible polymers that protect the film after melting and cooling. This helps both TPU and copolyester adhesives conform closely to the fabric structure rather than forming a stiff, surface‑level film.
These powder adhesive technologies are made with fine grain particles that melt smoothly and allow for a more uniform melting process; this provides a soft, natural feel to the fabric that creates breathability and softness. This optimized capability allows your final product to be comfortable and aesthetically pleasing, helping you provide high quality apparel printing.

How Bostik's Adhesives Improve Your Customers’ Production Efficiency

As an equipment manufacturer, efficiencies in your material components can directly translate into efficiencies for your customers, helping to strengthen long‑term brand loyalty.

Supply Chain Security: Bostik manufactures our powder adhesives in numerous areas around the globe, which can help ensure consistent product availability and reduce the risk of supply interruptions caused by outside disruptions, shipping delays or raw material shortages. Further, we are vertically integrated with the development of our copolyester and copolyamide hot melt powder formulations, utilizing our own raw materials for the finished solution.

This integrated manufacturing approach helps you align adhesive availability with production schedules and customer demand. It supports your ability to provide a fully branded, turnkey offering with materials designed to perform seamlessly with your equipment platform, helping maintain continuity from installation through ongoing operation. Further, by maintaining steady adhesive availability, your customers can reduce downtime, streamline job scheduling and keep their presses or transfer lines running with minimal delays. Reliable supply helps them produce more consistently, reduce changeovers, minimize waste from incomplete runs and maintain predictable throughput.

Equipment Ease Of Use: All our hot melt powder adhesive technologies are compatible with direct-to-film (DTF) equipment; this can provide a seamless transition when implementing your customer’s desired powder adhesive technology into their equipment. Further, it allows your customers to use the equipment they already own, avoiding the need for an equipment-related investment.

Powder Adhesives With Uniform Particle Sizes: As mentioned above, our TPU or copolyester powder adhesives offer uniform particle sizes to help ensure softness and visually-pleasing graphics. Uniform particles melt evenly across the design, forming a smooth, consistent adhesive layer. This helps prevent textural inconsistencies, reduces rough or raised areas; it supports clean, sharp graphic edges. The even melting also helps maintain fabric softness because the adhesive disperses uniformly rather than clumping or creating stiff spots.

For equipment, this can also help reduce the overall “caking” effect that occurs when adhesive builds on equipment, which can happen with inconsistent particle sizes. By not caking on, it can decrease cleanup and associated downtime for your customers who are using your complete branded system.

How Bostik's Adhesives Help Your Customers Reduce Adhesive Environmental Impact

Bostik’s hot melt powder adhesives are free of solvents or VOCs, because they are comprised of 100% solids.

This allows the adhesive component of your branded system to contribute to reducing the customer’s environmental footprint, allowing you to contribute to your customers’ overall sustainability goals without sacrificing performance. Further, certain hot melt powder adhesive technologies offer:

Compatibility With Silicone Inks: Silicone inks are a more sustainable component commonly used in DTF transfer printing because they are free of harmful chemicals such as PVC and heavy metals. They also offer high elasticity, which can help extend the life of the printed graphic, as elasticity helps resist cracking, maintain flexibility after repeated movement and stretching and hold up during long‑term wear. As a result, this can reduce the likelihood of reprints or discarded materials, allowing the compatible powder adhesive and silicone ink to contribute to reducing the customer’s overall environmental footprint.

Bostik’s copolyester or TPU powder adhesives are compatible with silicone inks, because they offer reliable adhesion to silicone‑based materials. This means the adhesive bonds securely without restricting how the ink layer moves. Because the adhesion is compatible with the ink’s chemistry, the powder adhesive does not stiffen or interfere with the ink film, allowing the silicone ink to stretch, flex and recover as intended. As a result, you can incorporate silicone inks for more sustainable practices without compromising the ink’s flexibility or durability.

How Bostik’s Technical Expertise
Can Strengthen Your Brand

How Bostik’s Technical Expertise Can Strengthen Your Brand

When you work with Bostik, you receive more than the adhesive technology itself. Bostik’s technical team supports you with guidance on powder selection, performance adjustment and integration into your equipment.

Our technical experts understand you have numerous components to consider when providing a complete system to customers, such as film, release coatings, inks and adhesives. Our powder adhesives are formulated to bond effectively, flow evenly across the ink layer and maintain compatibility with the film and release coating during pressing. This helps ensure each layer interacts as intended, reducing defects like poor peel performance, ink lift or edge curling. Our team can help you choose powder adhesive solutions for your customers, so everything works together for a high-quality, vibrant print.

Further, if you expand your product offerings and realize you need different performance capabilities, we can help you adjust the formulation for your desired changes. This assistance can help you deliver more consistent finished products to your customers, helping to strengthen your brand’s reputation for quality and dependability while giving your customers confidence that your system will support their own production goals without unexpected disruption.

Interested in learning how Bostik can operate behind your brand? Contact a Bostik expert to find out how we can address your specific performance, processing and environmental needs to help ensure your system performs consistently for your customers.