Q.

I have not yet started up my t-shirt business, which will be an eCommerce site selling funny t-shirts (no one is doing that, right? ).

I will not be doing the printing myself. Therefore, it seems there are (at least) two ways to handle getting the finished product in the door:

1. Buy t-shirts from a wholesaler, have them direct-shipped to the screenprinter, who then screens them. Alternatively, you could buy blanks and store them yourself, deliver them yoruself to the screenprinter, who would then screen them.

OR

2. Work exclusively with a screenprinter, who sources the shirts for you, and quotes you one price.

Can anyone comment on this? What are folks here doing? Any pros and cons to either method?

 

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pokerman

If you want to maximize YOUR profit, buy the shirts and give them to a printer.
If you ask them to order them, it means you'll pay more for a) the garment (why would they sell it to you for the same price as a distributor)...they aren't a bank so they need to make $$ of their investment and tying up cash b) you'll pay extra because of the paper work and manpower to order, receive, track, stock, etc. you get the idea and c) if you need a couple extra of this or that, they have the same costs involved in labor to order a few shirts as a few thousand.
You're either going to pay the printer in the long run to do all the grunt work for you or you'll have to do and figure your time into your cost of goods.
We embroider and when a "for resale" client asks us to order garments for them, we charge a minimum of 12% over the cost of the garment to cover our dollar investment in buying and internal paperwork.
And if a tee is on sale today from $1.35 down to $1.05, you're not going to get the sale price, you're going to be charged on the regular price, not today's sale price. So then you're paying a lot more for the convenience of having your printer do all your work and taking the risk of having stuff on time for you.
What's it worth to rely totally on someone else when YOU are running YOUR business?

 

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Q.

awesome post, thanks pokerman

 

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splathead

I have done it both ways. Once I established a volume relationship with my printer, he would order them for me at the same cost I could order them for. If there was a sale going on, I made sure to remind him of it when I ordered from him and he would give me the sale price.

One advantage of having your printer order is, if he is ordering other stuff from the distributor at the same time, your shipping costs would be less.

 

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