[greyhorsewoman]

Welcome, onmyway. You might start with a search through the forum on starting up a heat transfer business. There are a lot of threads about other members experiences getting set up doing heat transfers.

Briefly~~ you'd need a heat press and a printer and the correct paper for your needs.

If you are already planning to set up a printer with pigment inks, that would make printing the actual transfers easy enough. However, you won't get good results unless you apply them with a decent heat press. If you are only going to do occasional orders of 12 or less, it may not be cost effective.

I do heat press transfers at dog shows, mainly, and also do special orders for specialty clubs, rescues, etc. The additional wholesale orders are a nice bonus to my business, but it would not be realistic if I didn't have the major amount of my business from retail.

 

[greyhorsewoman]

You need a printer that uses pigment inks ~~ there are several Epson style printers at very reasonable costs, it's the INK that costs! We recently upgraded our little $75 Epson C88+ to refillable cartridges and it really reduced our ink costs. I think that model is pretty much discontinued now, but there are some new models that are very reasonably priced.

Durabrite inks have some issues (especially with yellow) ... there are several threads on that here too. Search on 'durabrite.' We've been hearing good things about the Claria inks, too, and will probably upgrade to that system when this printer gives out.

I use an a solid workhorse heatpress .. BlackMax 15x15 clamshell (made by Stahls and sold under a couple of different brandnames). (I've been hauling it around to a gazillon dog shows for the last 6 years, great machine.)

While we purchase a lot of transfers (am an authorized dealer for one line of our designs), we make all our transfers for my other line of designs. We also do custom work and small wholesale orders with customers designs.