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skitzz · May 15th, 2009

I have a customer that wants 200 sweatshirts imprinted with a logo. See attached. The sweatshirts would all be either white or light grey. I have screen press equipment, but it looks like a 6 color process job and I only have 4 color manual press, plus i am not too confident in my screen printing skills to attempt to pull off a 4 color process job. I have a message out to a local screenprinter on this job so I am waiting on that. However, i did a sample with a light heat transfer and it came out pretty nice. I used jet pro soft stretch and the colors were vibrant and the material was transparent enough that you could not see outlines where i cut on the white tee but on the grey tee was barely visble but still looked great. Anyhow, I thought it came out pretty good. my question is, what would I charge to do 200 heat transfers of this? Seems feasible but have no idea what to charge. Help!

splathead · May 15th, 2009

What's your cost for paper, ink, labor, cutting?

skitzz · May 15th, 2009

I dont know. I have an epson 1400 printer of which i use the standard ink. each ink cartridge (6 of them) is about $20. Not sure how many I can print on each cartridge. I can assume I will use the entire cartridge (all 6 color) to print all the transfers. Paper is about $0.75 apiece. Cutting takes about a minute or so as i wil simpley be cutting around the image with not much detail. Good question. Not sure. What should i charge for cutting?
How does this look for my costs?

paper - 200x$$0.75=$150
ink - $20x6=$120
cutting - $0.75x200=$150
total production costs=$420
Ok now what is fair markup % on this?

BTW, not sure if I mentioned this but the customer wil be providing the sweatshirts. How many extras shoud I ask them to provide in case of loss/bad print/etc...?

splathead · May 15th, 2009

1. You haven't told us how long this will take you and what your hourly rate is.

2. My guess is 200 hi-rez transfers will use up more than 1 set of cartridges. Perhaps not complete sets, but certainly some colors.

3. I would suggest a spoil rate of 2-3%

I strongly suggest before doing 200 with Claria ink that you wash test one several times and see how the ink holds up.

skitzz · May 15th, 2009

1.As for my rate. I guess its $25 an hour? Is that fair? Cutting takes about 2 minutes each - So 2x200=400 minutes or 6.67 hrsx$25/hr=$166.75 in labor
2. ok, so say I plan on replacing 1.5 sets of cartridges - that's $180
3.Yeah I plan on doing a wash test to see how it holds up.(probbaly most important thing or everything else is moot!. But I have had good success with Claria ink in the past.)

So here are my new prodcution costs:

paper - 200x$$0.75=$150
ink - $20x6x1.5=$180
cutting - $0.84x200=$166.75
total production costs=$496.75 or about $2.50 each

Ok so now that I got that figured out. My only question now is what to mark it up at? What is fair & hwo do you determine it?

BTW, many thanks in advance for your help on this, Joe. I have never actually went through and calcualted labor before. Its an eye-opener. Glad I went through this exercise.

splathead · May 15th, 2009

Hate to nic-pic, but you are forgetting labor to press. That's another minute per, or 3 1/2 hours roughly.

So that comes to $250 total in labor charges. Since you are doing your own labor, one could argue your markup is already included.

Not bad take home for less than a days work.

skitzz · May 15th, 2009

right! forgot about press time! So let me see if i understand this correctly.

paper - 200x$0.75=$150
ink - $20x6x1.5=$180
Press time & cutting labor - $25x10=$250
total production costs=$580.00 or about $2.90 each

So the $2.90 is what I should be charging for this job?

stuffnthingz · May 15th, 2009

Just a quick thought having printed out thousands of transfers, what about print time? You will have to monitor the printing of all those pages. Trust me its a pain and I have a very fast laser printer. I would put in some time for that work.

wormil · May 24th, 2009

Every product and service has a value that is determined by the market, it is not determined by your costs. Sometimes your costs are higher than the value in which case you lose money; or hopefully the value is much higher than your costs and you make a profit. The more savvy your customer, the closer to market value your pricing will have to be. Two ways to find the market value are shopping your competition and trail & error. With trial and error you'll basically do what you're doing, take your costs and tack on an acceptable amount of profit and see if your customer buys. The downside to trial and error is that it takes a while before you gain enough feedback to find out if your pricing is within market value.

ino · May 24th, 2009

You will also have to consider your rent,electrics,and any social costs you might have.

proworlded · May 25th, 2009

I agree that it is the marketplace that determines the price. Obviously, you have fixed and variable costs on every job and you must earn a reasonable profit. I think a job of this nature, using a 7 oz. Jerzees type sweatshirt, would sell for about $9 each for 200 units.

miktoxic · May 31st, 2009

i see that you recently posted a thread about finding a vendor for 4 color process transfers.

are reconsidering doing it yourself? if so, what were the reasons? i was wondering how were able to cut that design with all that detail?

skitzz · June 2nd, 2009

you know. I had considered it. But I have never done it before & was kinda leery about commiting to it before I actually kno wwhat the hell I am doing. Especially sine they are providing the garments.

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