Customer supplied goods

1752 Views 7 Replies 6 Participants Last post by smonster50, Mar 14, 2014

lastboat

Discussion Starter · Mar 14, 2014

I have one customer that has been buying t shirts and small towels and I have been printing for a piece price. How many of you do this? They called again this season and I'm less thrilled about it. Considering they wanted to tell me the price as what I gave to them on a specific job last year. I think it was $1.25 for single color on tea towels. There were 250 of them.
How would u handle?

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ncpawprinter

· #2 · Mar 14, 2014

I'm still trying to get all my pricing figured out too but I just had this happen. I printed up an order for about fifty shirts for a sport team. A week later a few of the parents wanted the same logo on their own shirts. I ordered three quarter length sofball shirts for the order but was handed six other shirts. I printed them since the screens were still burnt and charged them "an hourly rate." Made them happy and I wasn't out of pocket by any means. I don't want to make a habit out of it though.

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lkt1954

· #3 · Mar 14, 2014

My motto is to those customers- "you wouldn't carry food into a restaurant and ask them to cook it would you". I get kinda a funny look but they get the point.

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Fuzzyfreak

· #4 · Mar 14, 2014

lastboat said:
I have one customer that has been buying t shirts and small towels and I have been printing for a piece price. How many of you do this? They called again this season and I'm less thrilled about it. Considering they wanted to tell me the price as what I gave to them on a specific job last year. I think it was $1.25 for single color on tea towels. There were 250 of them.
How would u handle?

I also don't print on items brought into the shop, I will if it is a non-profit to wright off at the end of the year. All said, I might miss-print one or two items and then they are missing those items because they didn't bring enough items to be printed and didn't account for the miss prints.

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GHEENEE1

· #5 · Mar 14, 2014

First I let them know I'm not responsible for customer supplied garments. I've had some customers supply 2nds and defective garments, then complain. Plus, I mark up my blanks. Profit is why we're in business.

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smonster50

· #6 · Mar 14, 2014

I've done this quite often over the years and while you may be stuck replacing any messed up garments out of pocket, I have no problem doing it. From a production stand point, there really is no difference as long as you know what blend fabric you have, this should be easy enough to handle.

From the financial end, this could be a little more tricky since you no longer have the markup on the shirts to make a profit. What I've done in the past is offer retail customers my wholesale price that has been bumped up a percentage or two to accommodate for the missing garment mark up. Also, you got to keep in mind your labor rate. With that being said, $1.25 for 250 1 color tea towels seems to me like a decent price, but that is solely based off of my region and market. You may be able to actually charge a little more. And hey, if you don't necessarily want this job, try upping your price. One of two things will happen; 1 the customer takes his business somewhere else or 2 the customer realizes you know what your doing and will pay for it.

Good luck!

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