Tee shirts printing this week!

[IdolKnights]

Hey guys, I have these two designs printing this week and wanted to see a little reaction before we burn the screens.

[Lee]

I like the spitfire one :thumbsup:

Out of interest, what sort of cost is associated with printing t-shirts?

Ive had the domain tshirtbucks/tshirtcash for ages and not done anything with it yet but have been considering launching an affiliate program much like tshirthell for the past few months but wouldnt really know where to start so far as printing and stuff goes.

Regards,

Lee

[IdolKnights]

When it comes to cost you have to use a lot of factors.

Garment cost and minimum order required

The average for a Beefy Tee (Hanes) is around 6 or 7 $ and as low as $3. Hanes and Gildan are the most common shirts and cost the least.

You can also go higher end with the American Apparel and Columbia catalogs.

A printers average order is around 12 shirts per design. Some upwards of 22.

[b]Design[b]

If you have an in-house designer this will be the cost of your designer.*

Printing companies will also design your shirts. An average cost would be $45 to $60 an hour for design plus 1 correction, alteration.

*If you are printing 4, 6 or 12 colors make sure your designer understands color separation.

Burning the Screen

If you use a temp screen the process will only be good for about 24 shirts before the emulation used wears away. The Average cost is around $15 for the screen

If you use a permanent screen the process has a few more steps but will last for a run of 1000+ shirts. The average is around $25 for this screen* but that also includes storage.

*The cost will go up some if you need a non stock mesh count for detailed lines 1point or smaller.

Labor

Most places include labor into the total costs of screening, burning and design but an average is $1 or $2 per shirt/hat/whatever


The initial setup, as with anything, is where you put out your money and only pay a garment and labor charge after that.

This is if you plan to use the screen and ink process.

The other options would be heat press or ink jet scanner directly onto the shirts (think café press)

Hope that helps some.

[IdolKnights]

Once all is said and done - you can farm out a 100 shirts for close to $6.00 each

[gaybucks_chip]

Another option for smaller runs is embroidery. We did that recently for the shirts for Jeff and Skyler at Gay Phoenix Forum, and it was about the same cost, but looked a lot snazzier.

We had the graphics digitized for sewing from some online place in Pakistan. 24 hour service at about 1/5 the cost of US digitizers. Then we had a nice local lady with an embroidery machine in her garage do the embroidery on the shirts (which we supplied). It was about $15 for a gigantic design on the back and $5 for a small design on the left chest. But... no setup or screen charges, so it ended up being less than getting a dozen shirts screen printed.

For larger volume screen printing, there are several printers we use, typically we pay about $1.50 for a 3 or 4 color design, maybe a buck more for 6 or 8 color. That's with minimum of maybe 36 shirts and me supplying the shirt. There's also a setup (screen) charge of usually between $10 and $25 per color.

I like to buy the shirts and supply them to the printer to save the printer's markup, but sometimes it's just a hassle to do that, so if you work with the printer, particularly if you keep bringing in jobs, usually they'll cut you a break.

[IdolKnights]

With any option you can also have an embroidered tag sewn in.

You can find places as low as $.01 per tag on a run of 1000+ and have it sewn into the shirt for around $.05 to $.10 per shirt.

If by chance you have any Warner brother’s shirts you can look at the tag and will see that they cut out the tee brand tag, keep the washing and material tag, then sew in their own tag for better branding of just their name.

And yes, Embroidery is nice on a shirt but if you mix it up with a little ink….

Diesel puts out a line of shirts with the Diesel logo and some random image splash off centered behind it as well as an embroidered diesel logo along the hem.


Chip: I help our printer with all his custom art requests ... That too helps with cost cutting on my own jobs

Well that and we go fishing.

[Richard Craver]

maybe it's just my failing eyes but I can't make head or tails of the plane design one.

do u have it colour... maybe that would help.