Nitin said:
You’re a screen printing pro and you obviously know buckets loads about the whole area of printing.
I'm not a pro. I absorb a lot of information and I'm actively trying to learn, but I don't have years of experience to back it up as some here do. I wouldn't offer advice if I didn't think it could be helpful, but at the same time don't give too much weight to anything I say.
Nitin said:
I’m new to this, I’m creative, enthusiastic and cant wait to start learning a new trade. But like everything in life there are pro's and con's and i don't want to end up with "Paralysis by over analysis" if you know what mean?
I definitely know exactly what you mean - I've been there plenty of times myself, and I'm sure a lot of others here know exactly what that's like.
Nitin said:
What I’ve learnt over these few days is,
“To heat press or not to heat press??.. that is the question"
It is certainly the question, and the answer is, of course, an individual one.
I chose screenprinting for a variety of reasons - I guess I'll talk about that in the hope it sparks a few ideas in one direction or another. I actually got into all of this pretty recently, so the technology hasn't changed significantly in that time.
For starters I had hang-ups over the quality of all the transfers I'd seen over the years - the stuff I had seen I would never wear. Quality matters a lot to me - I may print a design that's not to my taste, but I'd never make a product I wouldn't wear for quality reasons. Simply put I had a prejudice against digital transfer which is still with me - sometimes I give it the benefit of the doubt and say "It's come a long way, it has its strengths", other times I'm quite mean spirited ("atrocious quality", "undiscerning buyers", etc.). I feel that, whether these generalisations are fair or not, they're held by a lot of people (by no means everyone). For that reason, heat pressed shirts aren't going to have the same customerbase. I've never heard of anyone not buying a t-shirt because it was screenprinted (poor printing, bad design - but not the printing method), but you do hear about that with heat press.
If you walk into a big chain store (Walmart, Target, Levis, etc.) all of the shirts will be screenprinted. All of the large casual fashion labels (Mambo, Mooks, Nike, etc.) use screenprinting. Artists use screenprinting. It has a history. That meant something to me (it won't to everyone, and it doesn't have to).
At the stage of my life I was at, I didn't like what I was doing and I wanted to be doing something physical. This was a way to make money, but I also wanted to learn a trade. I wanted to be using my hands. That was a large part of why I chose to learn screenprinting. You may laugh at this (others won't be surprised), but when I decided to go back to school I was facing two choices - law or screenprinting. I could have done either, and I decided on screenprinting (life isn't always about the money). For a while I had considered outsourcing the printing (a perfectly sensible business approach), but in the end I decided I wanted to be a printer. It also means I have a skill I can use to gain employment - you always need a fallback if t-shirt selling doesn't work out for you.
Digital technologies were (and are) on the rise, and that did (and does) concern me. I actually considered not picking up the trade, because I figured by the time I mastered it (which is still a ways off) my skillset would be obsolete. I decided to press on anyway, partly because nothing better was on my immediate horizon, and partly because I figured there has been a long history of pessimism in the screenprinting industry, and yet it has continued to survive. There will come a day, whether it's soon or not remains to be seen, that that is no longer the case. If you think about the kinds of fields manual printing was used in once upon a time, and where it is now... it's quickly apparent that manual printing is a concept with a definite shelf date. Screenprinting will be obsolete. That's not necessarily a problem (especially if you're outsourcing the printing - use what's good now, and change when it reaches obsolescence), but it might matter if you're planning on learning to print yourself rather than outsource.
Screenprinting is nowhere near as difficult as some people convince themselves. If you want to master it there's a lot to learn, but it's not like that comes at you all at once.
The fact is though that there are options options options. Some people here use various forms of heat pressing (vinyl, sublimation, digital transfer), some use screenprinting - and of those who screenprint only some print themselves, and others contract out the printing.
What you do depends more than anything on what you want to do. We could sit here and discuss the business pros and cons, but my attitude when I was getting into this was pretty much "**** money, I'm doing this for myself". Others will find that attitude very alien. I chose something I would enjoy that could be profitable. So the question is, what do you want to do? What would be enjoyable for you?
If you are primarily a designer/graphic artist, etc. then you should probably concentrate on that and either heat press (because it's easy), or outsource the printing to a screenprinter (even easier
). If you are a business person and want to maximise profit and minimise risk, you should probably start with heat press, then move on to outsourced screenprinting, then buy your own equipment and hire staff to move it in-house. If you are looking for something to do beyond just the art and business (you enjoy being hands on, or want a part in every stage of your business), you may want to consider taking up screenprinting itself.
The main thing to remember is that all of these methods are accessible to the everyman. When someone says its too expensive they're being impatient, or scared, or short-sighted, or trying to convince themselves, or any of a hundred other excuses - but they're wrong.
A full heat press setup (vinyl cutter, press, printer, etc.) is going to cost you $500-2500 (the lower end if you don't want to do vinyl). A full screenprinting setup (press, dryer, squeegees, screens, exposure unit) is going to cost you anything from $500-$15,000 depending on what options you go for, but is definitely attainable on a $5,000 budget. As far as starting a business goes, these are tiny sums of money.
Too many people focus on what's easy right now (if you want equipment and not to be tied up in inventory, that means heat press), instead of looking to the future. That goes both ways - there's no point in spending $10,000 on screenprinting equipment you don't know how to use if a heat press would have done the job just as well. But if you're going to make a success of yourself... what's $10,000 in equipment? What's $1000 in printed inventory? You should be turning that over in a
week! Okay that's not going to happen from the start, but there's no reason you can't invest in yourself. Maybe a share portfolio would have paid higher dividends, but if you end up doing this for the next ten or twenty years as an enjoyable career, do you really care?
But I think the most important question is
What do you want to do?. It can
all be made profitable, so you might as well be happy with whatever method you are using to make that money.
