There's no doubt that Carhartt makes very durable apparel. The Carhartt Rain Defender hoodie is very popular, for good reason, and the question often is can the Rain Defender be printed with a logo? Can reflective material be added to these jackets?

Rain Defenders are not a good substrate for reflective 3M Scotchlite, the standard reflective material for garment decoration. The water-resistant coating on Carhartts repel adhesives and they will eventually peel off. Whenever we do reflective on Carhartts for law enforcement, they are only bands that we then reinforce with stitching.

Typically, we will embroider Rain Defenders. If there's large back print lettering ("POLICE", "EMERGENCY") for a unit or department name, we'll use silicone cuts, typically in white or light grey. But left-chests with detail are always embroidered. We can use DTF too since we have different adhesives to bond the ink better to the weave, but you have to keep in mind that Rain Defenders are expensive to begin with, and need to last a long time without deco falling off, and that means embroidery.

Carhartt does logos on hoodies, but they are using oil-based screen print with bonding agents. Regular plastisol will not adhere well, so "after-market" screen printing isn't really an option either on anything other than larger quantities, since the garment surfaces need to be specially prepared and the ink is mixed with special additives.

Regular hoodies, like the Gildan 18500 or Hanes P170 are much more economical and don't have the same kind of decoration restrictions. But for the Rain Defenders, or any water-resistant garment, we strongly recommend embroidery for logos.

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