Discuss the various aspects of heat press technology. Transfer paper, inks, plastisol transfers, vinyl cutters, printers, commercial usage, durability, suppliers, etc.
Yes. Personalization can be a major cash cow for your business. Our largest personalized order to date was just under 3,000 dye sub shirts! Each shirt had two variable data fields and was sized proportionately to the shirt size.
We do print a few one-up items...mostly for customers that know exactly what we do. We have found it hard to pay the bills by printing the single items. Unless you are simply printing a photo, I would suggest you have a few templates for the customer to choose from. Sure you can absolutely customize each order, but too many choices seems to overwhelm people. You spend way to much time building and changing graphics.
Ron has some great words in the second half of his post. Doing 1 shirt at a time is very time consuming and, as stated, letting people know that anything goes allows people to take advantage of you. "I want this logo, change this color, can you make it look like the Cubs logo, I want this font, etc." We putting together some sheets with the available fonts and templates to expadite things quicker.
You can spend 10-20 minutes just taking an order with a customer and up to 45 minutes designing the artwork for a one piece order. Just make sure you're charging enough for your time and materials.
There's money to be made doing 1 piece orders - especially if none of the big screenprinters in your community do anything smaller than 12 shirts. It's just time consuming.
Ryan
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"It's difficult to heat press straight when you're hungover"
I've done a couple single shirt orders, but I really have to charge a lot to make it worth my time. I learned that lesson when I did a shirt for a friend. I spent about 2 hours in design (custom design), vinyl cutting, weeding and applying. I charged him $15 for the shirt. The materials cost me about $5. So if I make $5 on the materials, then I made $5 for my 2 hours of labor. $2.50 an hour is not worth it. But hey, you live and learn.
The worst thing is that he's never even paid me for it!
The biggest advantage of going the heat press route is that there's no minimum order quantity. You can do 1 or 1 thousand. Of course, you should charge more for 1's.
Does anyone do individual peronalized orders? 
www.busyPrinting.com
Heat Transfer Paper Price List
