Those who sell fabrics or clothes with prints on them probably want to make more money and make your business stand out from the rest. You might need a DTG printer, which stands for “direct-to-garment.”
This is an excellent way to go if you need to print in color or a complicated design but don’t want to spend too much money. Let’s talk about how direct-to-garment printing might be good for your business.
Profits
Your business could make a lot of money if you use DTG printing. Places like Zazzle and CafePress let you make your T-shirt for about $20 to $25. DTG printing lets you make a single T-shirt for an operational cost of between $1 and $3. It costs about $1 to print on a white or light-colored shirt, but it costs about $3 to print on a dark shirt. It’s a good profit for each shirt sold. If the profit margin is high enough, the money will return to you faster. Assuming a profit of $10 to $15 per shirt, you can figure out how long it will take to break even and how much you could make.
Printing on demand
This is one of the best things about DTG printing. Screen printing only works with a few colors and takes a long time to set up. The printer has to squeegee ink onto the shirt for each color, wait for it to dry, and then move on to the next. By using DTG:
- Besides putting the shirt on the platen, uploading the design, and clicking “print,” there isn’t much else to do.
- With the click of a button, you can get near-photographic designs with many colors, and in a few minutes, you’ll have a shirt ready to sell. Because it takes less time, even orders for just one or two shirts can be filled.
- No matter how much is ordered, the profit margin stays the same. You could improve the value of your customer service by adopting the “buy now, get it tomorrow” attitude of big online stores like Amazon.
Options for printing in small amounts
No matter how big the order is, you can still make money by printing high-quality t-shirts. DTG printers use smaller ink droplets, making it possible to add more detail and make pictures look like photos. DTG printers make printing complex gradients and color changes easy, which screen printers can’t do.
Screen printing is often the most cost-effective way to make a lot of shirts with one or two-color designs. Screen printing can be profitable with as few as 25–50 shirts for one–color runs or 50–100 shirts for two–color runs. Because setting up a screen printing press takes time and work, the cost per shirt is higher than with direct-to garment printing.
Friendly to the environment
Making T-shirts could help protect the environment or add to pollution. This issue affects all of us, even if there doesn’t seem to be a link at first glance. This is something that often goes wrong with screen printers. Inks with phthalates, PVC, and other chemicals are needed to ensure that the garment is processed correctly and that the ink sticks to it. The following is true:
• Many companies that make DTG printers have gone the extra mile and received approval from the OEKO-TEX 100 standard.
• Their inks are water-based, but they won’t come out of your clothes when you wash them, and their cleaning products and methods are considered good for the environment.
- DTG printing is the way to go if you want to ensure that your customers and the environment will benefit from your products.