You are correct, I have never digitized a design myself, but I have had several designs digitized, I've seen the process and I am pretty familiar with the machine costs.
But do you do a free sample for every *potential* customer that might get with their custom logo or do you have limits?
What if their logo is 50,000 stitches? What if it goes on a jacket and is 12" across? What if they don't want to give you any money and haven't committed to doing the job through you or not? What if you had 100 customers per day that wanted the same thing?
Obviously there has to be limits somewhere.
Because the samples they have are
already printed. They don't print the samples on demand when someone requests a sample.
They have overruns of previous jobs that they can save and send out to help show prospective clients the overall quality of their work.
That's generally the type of samples that printers give out. The type that shows the potential customer the quality of their work. Nobody should give away their work for free. Of course they can if they want to, but it shouldn't be expected of them.
I've received
samples from about 8 different companies (
shown here) and each time I was prepared to pay for the samples and the shipping, and each time the plastisol transfer company did not ask for any payment. Since they have the samples already printed, the only thing they have to pay for is the shipping cost. They justify the small shipping cost per qualified lead as part of their marketing/advertising costs to help land customers. When you add the setup time to print a custom image, burn screens, etc, the cost to land that customer doesn't bring in a positive Return on Investment anymore.
It sounds like your customers are looking for samples of their specific job for some reason. I think if you address that issue, you could still gain those customers.
They may be asking for samples of their specific job because they know that you give away samples for embroidery so they may think that screen printing should be the same thing.
The fact is that the printing process for embroidery samples and screen printed samples are completely different. Embroidery samples ARE much easier to give than screen printed samples. That's why many embroidery shops can do just ONE t-shirt for a customer. That's why you can see embroidery done on demand in a mall setting. Because it's easier to setup one design and print it.
You'll never seen screen printing on demand in a mall setting. Because the setup is much too costly and time consuming.
That doesn't mean that screen printers don't care about the little guy.
That just means that you may have to educate your customers about the differences between screen printing and embroidery.
It's nothing bad or evil with the process, it's just different than what you (and they) are used to.
Once you explain it to them and keep a policy about it, it will go much smoother.
If you think about all the screen printing businesses out there that go through this every day, you'll see that it is possible to still sell screen printed t-shirts without having to show the customer a printed sample t-shirt.
I've sold screen printing services for about 7 years now. Lots of customers that I've never seen before. Sure, we've had requests for a "printed t-shirt sample", but usually once we explain the costs involved, how we work, how we quality check, how we do digital proofs, the customer is fine with the outcome 99.9% of the time. Some customers decide that they wont' do the job without a printed proof and that's OK. You can't win every customer.
Are their exceptions to that rule? Sure. One order was for 8000 pieces to be shipped out of country. Once the order was secured, we worked it out with the customer to do one printed proof for them to approve. In that case, it made financial sense to print the shirt since we had a guaranteed order (not a *possible* order) and since it benefited both parties to make sure that it was done exactly right. The cost of printing the one shirt was easily justified by the potential cost of misprinting 8000 shirts.
I think you can still sell plastisol transfers...you just have to think about it a different way than you do with your current embroidery setup.
Once you figure out what your exact customer concerns are, you can figure out how to address them and still get the order.
I think the reason nobody would quote you is because they may think you (like many customers who may have asked for custom samples), may not be willing to pay the price that would cover their time and costs.
So far we know that $90 is too high. But there must be some amount that you would think is an "OK" amount for a custom printed transfer (how many colors)? Depending on the design and the number of colors, it may be actually cheaper to get the company's mimimum order.
There are other print options for customers that really must have a sample though. Direct to Garment printing doesn't have the same setup fees/time/costs as screen printing and you can usually order just one t-shirt from a DTG printer. I've sold DTG printed samples for $25.