So, you’re considering getting into Tshirt printing as a trade supplier of printed Tshirts in bulk?
To print in-house, or to broker?
As a trade tshirt printing business, you have two business models to adopt, the in-house printer, and the broker.
As a broker, basically you will focus purely on getting the sales, and then you’ll pass the orders to your printer.
The pros of brokering Vs printing in house.
- No investment in equipment required.
- No production employees required
- Little or no requirement for business premises.
- Leaves you free to focus on marketing
The cons of brokering Vs printing in house.
- Smaller profit margins
- Less control over the quality of the product
- Less control over lead time
To quickly sum up the pros and cons of brokering vs printing in house, brokering means smaller overheads, lower startup requirements, and allows you to focus purely on winning business, to pass to your printer.
It also means smaller margins, as you’ll be sharing the profits with your printer, it means you’re in the hands of your printer when it comes to the quality of the finished products, and lead-time.
I’ve had experience in the brokering business model in the past, there certainly are benefits, but there are drawbacks too. It really depends, I think, on where your strongpoints are. If you’re a marketing person, a sales person, and if the idea of running a production company doesn’t appeal to you, then the brokering model may be the right choice.
Just keep in mind that you’re going to have to bring in more business if you’re working as a broker, as your profit margins will be smaller, and you’ll need to put some work in to make sure you’re choosing the best printing firm(s) as partners.
Decided on printing in-house?
Which are the best Tshirt printing methods for trade/bulk Tshirt printing?
Tshirt Screen Printing
In my personal opinion, the number one Tshirt printing for bulk Tshirts & other garments, for trade, is Tshirt screen printing.
Most bulk Tshirt printers tend to use screen printing as their main Tshirt printing method, mainly because it’s such a fast and low cost Tshirt printing process for bulk.
As a trade Tshirt printer you may well add other digital printing methods as strings to your bow over the years, as and when you decide that you must invest in such printing methods in order to open doors into other markets you have identified, but most bulk garment printers focus on screen as their main printing method.
There are exceptions. For instance, if you’re focusing on sports garments, such as football, hockey or basketball sports kit. If this is your area of focus, then you may find that wide format printing via dye sublimation, and then using a wide format specialist cutter to cut out your garment panels, to then be sewn into the finished garments, is the best way forward.
But for regular cotton Tshirts and other garments in bulk, screen printing is very difficult to compete with, for bulk printing.
Direct to Garment Printing
Direct to garment printers, or “DTG” printers, can be an option for digital trade garment printing.
Some of the more commercial (and more expensive, naturally) direct to garment printers can now perform very well in terms of production speeds and per Tshirt printing costs.
The Kornit Avalanche 1000, for example, can churn out as many as 220 Tshirts per hour, as can other similar bulk DTG printers, but at hundreds of thousands of dollars, this level of DTG printer is out of reach of most start up Tshirt printing businesses.
If you’re getting setup to print DTG for trade printing, with a more modest budget of maybe $5,000 – $15,000 to spend on a direct to garment printer, your printing speed and per Tshirt printing costs are likely to be prohibitive when it comes to competing against screen printers, and against more established digital Tshirt printing firms who have more commercial printing setups.
