I need Help I have an anajet dgt that I just bought, I love the printer so far. I got an order from a lady that we do contract embroidery for. She brought me around 40 to 45 shirts with several different designs to go on them. She provided the shirts and they all had to be pretreated with a white underlay on all of them. I charged her 5.00 a peice, I think that was too cheap, please help. How much would you charge?
For Anajet prints, we start the print only cost at $15.00 and work down from there based on quantity, print size and white ink coverage.
Look at it this way, count the number of colors in each design and multiply that number by $25-45 dollars. Then divide the previously calculated cost by number of shirts that used that design. That will give you a lowball cost per shirt if the designs had been screenprinted. If you beat that price and make money, customer and shop both win. If you beat that price and don't make money, then only the customer got a good deal.
If you gonna do contract work, look into turning machine to a bulk ink system, very cheap to do it, more maintenance but you will cut ink cost by over 1/2
The graphic was 10x9 white underbase + CMYK. I just about used up 3/4 of all white ink.
I agree with mrbigjack50 that you probably spent at least 3-4 dollars in ink at the size of a print before adding in pretreatment, labor, electricity and machine time. I know using bulk ink costs I would have spent at least $3.00 in just white ink based on your description.
Switching to bulk ink will help you control your costs but unless you have the volume to keep the printer flowing (ie print daily) I would probably advise against it.
You can however still save money by purchasing cleaning fluid for maintainance in bulk and use bulk cartridges for cleaning as well.
Based on cartridge pricing (lat I saw anyway) the cost per liter for ink on this machine is $580 per liter for colors and $680 per liter for white. If you cartridges are 110 ml each and you used 3/4 of them then you consumed about 330 ml of white ink or roughly $225 worth of white ink and whatever amount of colors - probably about $10-20 worth, plus pre-treatment which is probably costing you 25-50 cents per shirt if properly applied and priced at about $100 per gallon ($25 per liter). I would venture to guess that you real cost was more like $5.50-6.00 per shirt for ink and pre-treatment - not including labor. Most folks would probably charged at least $12.00 for the job.
Don't forget time. If you double ink cost, and the profit doesn't pay your salary AND overhead and a little bit more, there is little point. Printing lights the ratio of prints per hour vs. cost of ink looks competitive. in a Contract (wholesale) scenario... you can try to duplicate that ratio for darks, but you'll see the big difference and understand where you need to put your time and effort.
Contract prices on darks 
Re: Contract prices on darks 
