Pricing screen printing jobs accurately is a vital aspect of your business. This is the determinant in whether or not your business is going to be profitable.
In order to be sure that you are pricing jobs correctly and producing the profit necessary to make running a screen print shop worth it, it's important that you have an understanding of the costs which will be associated with each job. This post will give you a general outline of what you can expect to be paying for.
1. Printing Materials
These are going to be the materials you are printing designs on to. Most commonly, this is the cost associated with blank t-shirts for use in t-shirt printing services. When buying t-shirts at wholesale prices, expect to pay around $2.00 per blank t-shirt.
2. Mesh Screens
This is the cost for purchasing mesh screens to be used for your screen prints. More on this in the next item.
3. Screen Setup
For every screen printing job, you will be required to setup a mesh screen to use to transfer the image onto substrate. This will usually cost you another $2.00 per screen, and you will need a new screen for every design you wish to screen print. This means that you will price jobs differently based on the number of unique designs that are to be printed. There is also time associated with setting up the mesh screens which you should factor into your pricing as well.
4. Labor Costs
This one is pretty self-explanatory. Make sure that you are keeping track of your production staff's hourly rates, and how much time is required of them on average for screen printing jobs of different kinds. This will help you get a good estimate for what to expect in labor costs for a particular job.
5. Ink
This one is not something that you need to know the specific costs for each job, because it is an unnoticeable difference on such a small scale. On average, you should estimate that $.04-$.05 will be used for each t-shirt that is printed.
6. Business Overhead
Another pretty straight-forward cost here. This is, of course, different for every business and you will have the best idea of what it looks like for your business.
Conclusion
So, there you have it. These are the major expenses that will be associated with each job you produce and that should be accounted for when developing your pricing tables.
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