The advice below is for those interested in running a clothing line. If your first concern is money, then the advice may not apply. It's about what are, in my opinion, best case scenarios, not cheapest ones.
I agree with David's main point:
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Don’t learn to screen print simply because you think it will save you money on your professional t-shirt line. It won’t. | |  | |  | |
What David writes is true (and good advice for most people), it's just not the whole story. There are other reasons to do your own printing it's important not to overlook. I think it's worth taking a look at the flipside.
There are things those of us who print for ourselves largely take for granted that just won't be possible if you pay someone else to do your printing. Last minute changes, smaller runs, garment changes, colour changes, cheap test prints, etc. You can pay a printer to do some of this, but someone else will never offer you as many options on these things as you can offer yourself.
One of the smallest examples: you decide you want a certain Pantone colour for your ink. Your printer prints it. You realise it wasn't quite right. If you were printing yourself, it would be absolutely trivial to correct this as you go.
As David has documented on his blog, the transition from printing for himself to outsourcing comes with its drawbacks ("
For example: the first print run of the Taco Dinosaur has completely sold out in almost every size. Typically, the instant something like this happened, I would order shirts and reprint it within a matter of days. Now? I have to order the shirts, put in an order, and wait two weeks. Of course, the logical answer is “plan further ahead”, so I’m trying to do that.").
On the one hand the organisation that this requires will have a positive impact on the rest of your business too, but on the other hand it means there are customer service options that are simply no longer available to you. You can't plan for everything, and the more that is under your control the quicker you can respond.
The product testing phase becomes longer/slower and more expensive. Usually the end result of this is less product testing. Which means if you don't get things perfect the first time, your brand's attention to detail will suffer. A small amount maybe, but some all the same - how much it matters depends on what your brand is shooting for.
Creative experimentation is part of the design process from the moment you come up with an idea (or even before) through to when the product is finished. The more stages of this process you are personally involved in, the more opportunity there is for creative intervention. It's (usually) better for your design, and personally fulfilling. As a printer you're more able to work directly with your film positive, or more directly even with the screen itself. For some styles this isn't even an advantage, but for some artists/designers this is a massive benefit (speaking of my own work, some of my favourite pieces were created with little or
no computer aid - as a longtime computer nerd, I wouldn't have anticipated this before learning to print).
The
advantage of outsourcing in this regard is that it encourages you to come up with a fixed idea more quickly, and move on to something else (i.e. the builder's house is never done principle). You're less likely to have a perfectly perfect product, but more likely to have a perfectly
good product and time to produce another one.
The most important point is that there are options available to clothing lines that print their own clothes that simply aren't available to those who outsource. If you want to do short runs or have an absurdly quick turnaround for one (by absurdly quick turnaround I mean: something happens in the cultural sphere on a Friday night, and you have a market event scheduled for Sunday: on Saturday you can design and print a run of shirts in response to that event; on Sunday it's a quick sale, in three weeks it's old hat).
This is especially true if you like to come up with fiddly little ideas; things that aren't necessarily impractical to do yourself, but no printer is going to spend their afternoon working out how to do.
As far as Seibei goes, they actually provide the perfect example for this: the IZHL shirt. If Seibei had started out outsourcing from the beginning, there is no way that shirt ever would have been made. Given that that's the shirt that gave Seibei its first big break, it's plausible that that was the difference between success and failure.
Another small example: you have a cool design, it sells okay. You want to do a limited edition version of
five shirts in gold foil to give away for marketing. If you have a good relationship with your printer, you
might be able to work something out. If you
are your printer, this is trivial. These small things add up; creative options are simply easier when you can implement them yourself.
If you want to reach your zenith as an artist or designer, you need to fully understand the medium you're working with. Do you want to be a good designer, or a
great designer? The best print-designers are printer-designers. Yes there's something to be said for a naive
insisting on the impossible attitude, but in reality the best person to implement the impossible is not the put-upon printer you contracted, but the person determined to make it happen (that would be you).
I'm not saying that any given printer-designer will be better than another designer, but what I am saying is if you are a printer-designer then all else being equal you are a better designer than the alternate universe you that never learnt to print.
I'm not saying that everyone should learn to print, nor am I saying that you're screwed if you don't. What I am saying, is that it's worth being aware there are fundamental benefits to doing so. If you're thinking about doing it, that would be why you should do it. Why
not would be because it's time consuming, frustrating, and expensive.
Life is a series of trade-offs, and we can't learn everything we want to learn, be everything we want to be, or do everything we want to do. It might be better for you as a person, or for you as a business, never to learn to print. I'm sure I would gain insight if I sewed my own t-shirts, but I'm not going to go that far. It's the
manufacturing process... that would be absurd! I pay better qualified people to do that for me! ...sounds just like printing, right? Right - it is. We all make tradeoffs, and you'll have to decide where the line is for your business.
It's also important to be clear that I'm
not talking about learning
about print, I'm talking
learn to print. Despite what some designers would have you believe, they're not the same thing - the theory is
not the practice. (Beyond learning, some of the avantages persist just by fully comprehending how to print, some of them only apply if you continue to print yourself.)
Learning about print is a good minimum, but the printer-designer will always have a slight edge over the designer. Why? Because there are little tips and tricks that we can't be bothered to teach you, don't think to pass on, don't
want to pass on, or can't even really put into words. When it is second nature and you don't have to think about it, you waste a lot less time designing.
Money alone is the wrong reason to learn, it's just not worth the effort to save some money. It's fine as a day job if that's what you want, but I don't think that's what people are looking for. Most people starting a clothing line already have a job, plus the second job of starting their clothing line. You'd better be sure you want to be a printer before you go adding that third job to your roster - it's not like learning a bit of bookkeeping or dabbling in SEO, it's a whole extra job. If you don't have the passion for it you'll probably just burn out, and you won't immerse yourself enough in what you're doing to really experience the beneficial insights I'm talking about.
David is right when he says
"In this business, there’s no room for people who aren’t awesome at something.", but I'd go a step further: there's no room for people who aren't awesome at
several somethings. Printing doesn't have to be one of them, but it can be. If you're not going to be a printer, it's not enough to be a shrewd marketer. We all need to be that, it goes without saying. Find more than one talent, and be great at both.
And the ones we
all have to have.
As for printing as a hobby, personally I think dabbling in the craft of screenprinting while outsourcing your printing is a waste of time (for those who want to run a clothing line). It might be an enjoyable hobby, but as a hobby it's an expensive and time consuming one. If you want something creative that's going to benefit your business, you'd be better off taking life drawing classes.
I wholeheartedly agree with these points:
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you can only teach yourself so much through books and practice [...] while there are plenty of great printers out there, there are some pretty low quality prints getting sold out there [...] low quality prints make us all look bad [...] Accept that it will take a while before you can print something worth selling. | | | | | | |
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I think a lot of people just don’t understand just how WIDE the gap between screen printing hobbyists and screen printing professionals is. | | | | | | |
There are some people out there who are in way over their head. It's obvious to those who know what they're doing who they are, but we're powerless to say anything. It's frustrating. You know those stories we all read/hear about "My client went to the cheaper printer down the street, then came back to me when they screwed it up."? That guy down the street doesn't just stay down the street, sometimes he posts on forums or blogs, or goes to craft fairs - he's not anonymous.
On that note... if you do choose to outsource (and I think it's a perfectly valid choice) make sure you check the quality of your printer. Not everyone who haphazardly slaps ink on a shirt and calls themself a printer deserves the title.
I think I've been clear, but in case not: none of the above is a dig at David. I like David and what he does with Seibei, I read his blog regularly (have since 2006), and I agree with most of what he posted. There are hacks in our industry - David is not one of them.
[Article for those starting clothing lines] printing yourself versus outsourcing the printing to a screen printer 
