Crocking

Crocking is measured industry-wide with a crockmeter, which rubs a standard cloth against a printed surface a set number of strokes and grades the color transfer on a scale from 1 to 5, five meaning no transfer at all. It happens both dry, a white shirt worn under a dark jacket, and wet, color rubbing off on damp skin, and the two get tested and rated separately because sweat and friction affect ink differently than dry rubbing does.

For a buyer, crocking shows up as blue jean dye rubbing onto a white tee, or worse, a printed logo leaving color on a customer's arm at a trade show booth, both a quality embarrassment and sometimes a liability question if it happens on a client's own skin. It's most common with under-cured plastisol, poorly fixed dyes, or cheap pigment-based ink that never fully bonds to the fiber.

Printers test crocking on any run headed to a demanding buyer, uniforms, team gear, anything worn against skin for hours, by rubbing a white cloth against a cured sample before shipping the full order. A failed crock test almost always traces back to cure temperature or ink formulation, not the garment itself.

Buyers sometimes assume crocking is exclusively a fabric dye problem; it's just as often a print-side defect, where color that never fully cured rubs free the same way a bad dye job would.