T-Shirt Business Profit Tips: Additional Print Placements | Videos

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Hey friends! Dave here from Transfer Express. Today, we’re talking about how you can add value and pack some profit into your printed apparel with additional placements and screen printed transfers.

Now, our specific example today is for some baseball fan gear, but you can use these same ideas and techniques to print pretty much any type of apparel. We’ll cover using screen printed heat transfers, gang sheets and multiple print placements, so you can boost the value of any printed apparel.

Ready? Let’s hit this one out of the park.

We’re going to be printing a nice bulk run of some premium looking team or fan gear here today, and we’re going to be able to knock it out with some great profit margins and some accessories with our heat press.

To start, we have our hoodie here, one of my favorites, the Port and Company PC850H Fan Favorite Fleece Hoodie. This is a great 80/20 cotton blend that’s great for pretty much any heat transfer without worries of heat sensitivity.

Of course, we’ve got the trusty Hotronix Auto Clam here behind us that we’ll be decorating on today that has spot on temperature, so we know we’ll have that accurate temperature for peace-of-mind printing.

Alright, back to the job. This travel baseball team wants to knock these hoodies out of the park with some pro-level looks on a little league budget. But have no fear, let me show you how we can go from concept to finished product by the end of this video.

The only directive from the team: we’ve got to have the team name, league logo and conference on the garment, but what’s really going to take this over the top is some additional print placements that make this look much more like something you’d see in the major leagues. Ready? Let’s start creating.

First up, let’s head over to Easy View online designer at TransferExpress.com to start designing and laying out our profit packed gang sheet.

Now, if you’re new to us here at Transfer Express, Easy View is a free online design tool that you can design professional t-shirt artwork with zero design experience needed. I come from a graphic design background and find myself jumping into Easy View to knock out most projects more often than not these days because of the easily customizable layouts that you can change with just a couple clicks to fit your needs. I’ll link my most recent master class right here if you’re interested in learning more.

Right off the bat, we’re able to import the vector file here of the league that the team provided as well as the conference. With those out of the way, we’ll start our front design with just some simple, clean, classic and timeless text. Here we’ll put our team name, the “raiders” in by just clicking Add Text.

Next we can set the font. There’s over 250+ fonts here in the designer to choose from. I think serpentine looks pretty clean here. There we go, once we select it we see our changes here in real time.

From here, let’s change this to just an outline instead of the text filled in with ink. We can click Outline and add a touching outline. Once we set our color, we can update the fill color right here in the edit menu and bam, just like that, everything is updating in real time.

We’ll repeat the same step here for the team name and baseball. This time using Bebas Neue for our font.

Now we can start to arrange our artwork. On the front of the hoodies, we’ll have our main team graphic, combined with the league logo. Let’s size our design to 11 inches wide here in the edit menu and the league logo to 3 inches wide. Then just space it off just by a couple inches from the design for almost a left-chest placement. I want these to stay together essentially as one image, that way its going to be easy to print these on press. Consistent, repeatable placement is always what I'm aiming for, and having to place this little logo each time can be time consuming.

Now, let’s fill the rest of the sheet with our division sleeve logo, a smaller version of the Raiders baseball logo, and some of our own logos we’ll print near the left side-seam. With just the standard size gang sheet for our Goof Proof screen printed transfers here today at 11.25" x 14”, we can fit two of each graphic here by playing a little bit of Tetris.

Say we need 50 total hoodies, we only need 25 sheets, which puts our pricing right at $3.81 per sheet, which the designer tells us here on the lower right. And $3.81 divided by two is just $1.90 in print cost per hoodie… that for essentially FIVE print locations. Two sleeves, the front, the left chest and the bottom side print. Talk about some profit potential!

Of course with how awesome the designer is, we can even give this a mockup treatment using the exact style we’re printing on. Let's search PC850H and pull up our front view. Next we can select each element from our gang sheet we want to use, and click Selection Only. Then it’s just placing the designs on the shirt. There we have it - ready to proof with our customer, all in just a few minutes.

Once our customer approves, we can order our transfers.

Next is printing. I’m going to use some accessories here for quick and easy printing. When we’re talking about doing bulk runs, I always like to do one location on all of the shirts before changing the placement. This reduces setup time and allows for more efficient printing. Since I’ll be changing out platens and adjusting our pressure every time, it’ll be much easier to keep everything the same for the full run, then change the location.

Today, I’ll be using a few different interchangeable platens on our Hotronix press - the 11" x 15" platen for our full front designs so we can avoid the obstruction of the hoodie pocket seams. We’ll also be using the Leg and Sleeve platen, as well as our full 16" x 20" for some of our other placements.

There you have it, a hoodie that cost just $1.90 in transfers to print on a $12 blank, but we’ll be selling these 50 wholesale for $30-35 easy - which is still less than a national competitor would quote for just TWO print locations. Just like that, it’s easy to get over $1000 in profit in your pocket for just 50 hoodies. And you’ll crush their two week turn time.

Pretty nifty, eh? Talk about a homerun!

As always, be sure you’re subscribed to our Transfer Express YouTube page to stay up to date on all of the t-shirt business tips, tricks, and inspiration we’re dropping every single week! But, until next time, I’m Dave, happy pressing!