Printing T Shirts, How to Make Things Easy For Yourself!

One of the things that never ceases to amaze me with people just getting into printing Tshirts, is how difficult folk tend to make it for themselves ;-). You know, starting a Tshirt printing business really doesn’t need to be as difficult and as frustrating as many people make it, in fact it can be incredibly straight forward.

What it all boils down to, is very simple. It’s one word:

Focus.

Many people who come to me for advice on starting a Tshirt or other garment and/or gifts printing business, make things incredibly complex for themselves simply because they have no focus.

What – EXACTLY- do you want to produce?

Who is your target market, initially, and what products are you going to be providing?

If your answer to this (and I get this a lot) is “Tshirts, and lots of other items, to anyone” – then you have no focus, and as a result, it’s going to be very difficult for you to know whether you’re getting setup with the correct gear.

Let me give you an example of someone who does have focus, so you can see the difference.

Occasionally, a customer will tell me: I’m starting a business printing mainly one-use Tshirts for Stag & Hen / Bachelor & Bachelorette Parties & other events.

The rest of the conversation will go something along the lines of:

Me: OK, no problem. Are you going to be printing just text, single colour etc., or photographic?

Customer: Mainly photos & other designs, multi colour, some text too.

Me: OK, do you need to print on dark, or are you OK on white & light colours?

Customer: White & light colours are fine.

Me: Great, does it need to be cotton?

Customer: Doesn’t really matter.

Me: Do you need a big range of shirt styles?

Customer: No, as little choice as possible, I want to keep minimal blanks stocks.

Me: OK, I’d go for dye sublimation. Nice and simple, fantastic, permanent high quality vibrant prints onto white and light coloured polyester Tshirts (there’s a growing range of 100% polyester and specialist dye sublimation garments). All you need is a dye sublimation printer and a flat heat press. Set up cost from around eight hundred to a thousand, or more, depending on which heat press you go for – but dye sublimation is easy on the press, so you don’t really need anything fancy.  Also – if you want to add to your range in the future, with this same setup you can press onto a huge range of other dye sublimation blanks – and if you add a mug press, you can produce mugs too, which are a great seasonal seller.

This is just one example of someone who is starting out with some focus, so it’s clear which is the best print process for them starting out.

But here’s the way a conversation goes more often than not:

Customer: I want to start a business printing Tshirts and other garments, and lots of other items.

Me: What kind of markets are you planning on selling into?

Customer: Nothing. Tumbleweed blowing past.

Me:  Do you know if you’ll be wanting to print onto cotton garments, or polyester?

Customer: Both? I’m not sure.

Me: Do you know if you’re going to want to print onto dark garments as well as white and light coloured garments?

Customer: I’m not sure.

Me: What’s your budget.

Customer: I’m not sure.

The issue here is that the customer doesn’t know who their target market is, so they can’t know what they’ll want, they don’t really know what they want to produce – so I really can’t advise them on a way forward. Sometimes folk getting into printing, vastly underestimate the startup costs of certain processes too.

One customer recently told me all of the things she wanted to do – which was more or less everything and anything you can think of, including garments & homeware items of all shapes & sizes.  My honest answer when it came to what she needed to get setup, was probably a couple hundred thousand dollars budget, a fairly large factory, and at least half a dozen staff. She was blown away, as she was wanting to do this on her own with a budget of a few hundred.

So what I said to her, and what I say to many, many people – is that you’re better off taking a step back, and focusing initially on one particular type of customer, to whom you’re going to sell one particular type of product.

Figure out who they are, what they want exactly, how you can reach them, how much they’ll be willing to pay,  what the competition is missing when it comes to this particular market that you can take advantage of, and get started focusing purely on this market, with one type of printer, one main type of garment, and then grow your business from there.

When you’re this laser focused, it’s very easy to know exactly what set up you need, as you’ll know exactly what kind of garments you need to print.

For example, if you’re focusing on shirts for small independent rock bands who will be selling them at gigs, you’ll probably want black cotton Tshirts & hoodies.  This really narrows things down when it comes to what equipment you’ll need.

If you’re focusing on one use Tshirts for parties & so on, you’ll probably want white & light coloured garments, and there probably won’t be a huge sway towards cotton, so dye sublimation will probably be the best way forward.

It also really helps to have a good understanding of what business model you’re going for too as well as knowing who your customers are.

For example, you may be planning on selling large volumes of Tshirts wholesale – but are you shipping stock  to the customer – or on a drop ship basis, large volumes but split up into individual orders being delivered directly to the end user with their own unique design? This would change which print process would be suitable, if it was the former then screen would be the obvious choice, but if it was the latter, you couldn’t really go the screen route as you’d need a new screen to be exposed for each individual order.

It all comes down to having properly planned  what it is you’re about to do – you know the old saying “failing to plan is planning to fail” – it’s a cliche, but it’s a very true one.  If you don’t know exactly who your target market is before you start, you’re leaving everything to chance, you may well end up with completely the wrong kind of setup. Even more importantly, if you don’t know who your target market are, how are  you going to promote your business? I can tell you from personal experience, even if you have a physical shop on a popular high street – “build it and they will come” is an utter myth.

So if at this stage you’re not sure what gear you need – just take a step back, and as yourself “who, exactly, are my target market?”. If you know the answer to this, then you can figure out what they need – what kind of garments, what do they need to be made of, what base color(s) do they need to be, what kind of designs will they need, basic one and two colour, or full photographic? Once you’ve gone through this process, you should have a far better idea of what kind of kit you’re going to need to get started – and then as your business grows, you can also target other markets and invest in adding other print processes as strings to your bow if required.