How To Price Direct To Garment Printing For Largest Profit

DTG, which stands for direct-to-garment, style printing method permits you to print the design directly to a garment. It requires you to use a very specialized printer and inks for this purpose. This unique equipment and supplies among others have to be factored in your cost so that you will be able to price properly. And I want to show you how through this article.

How do you price DTG printing? First, you have to list all the costs involved in the specific printing job. They are the item costs, printing costs, and overhead costs. You will then sum up all of these costs after which you will apply the markup to the total costs computed. The resulting number will be the amount that you will be charging your customers.

I will go over the details of the costs involved later in this article.

My goal here is to list all the possible costs to enable you to effectively decide whether they should be part of your own shop’s expenses. Once you properly have the true costs at hand, you will be guaranteed to turn in a profit for your DTG printing jobs.

Item Costs

Simply put, we are referring to the garment where you will be printing on. This could be a t-shirt, hoodie, towels, or any other product.

Please always remember that this will be the purchase cost that you have paid for and not what you will be charging the customer.

It is in your best interest to buy these items at wholesale to enable you to obtain the cheapest cost. There are many wholesalers around interested in earning your business.

Printing Costs

Now we come to the heart of your pricing strategy.

There are different parts of these printing costs and I will go over them one by one.

Before I go on, let me just state that for the purpose of this article, I will base my projection on the use of the Epson Sure Color F2000 DTG printer.

This printer is the widely regarded best in the industry because of its perceived reliability. It is also the most popular model around.

Ink Consumption

Remember that in DTG printing you will be charging by the size of the print area.

You will not bill the client by the number of colors totally unlike in screen printing.

The size of the print area directly affects the ink consumption of the printer. Therefore it is quite logical that a design with a large area of imprint will use more ink and hence needs to be charged more.

You will need to measure approximately how much ink this particular printing job has used.

And this is one of the advantage of the Epson F2000 DTG printer for it has already built-in within it a cost estimator application. This software accurately relays the quantity of ink utilized for that job so that you can arrive at the dollar amount easily.

You will need to know how much is your ink cartridge and divide it by its volume usually in milliliters or ml. This amount will be equivalent to the cost of this ink per ml.

After knowing the volume of ink consumed by the print job as relayed by this software, multiply it by this cost per ml. This will be the total ink amount consumed by this print job.

You may find it useful to create a reference handy guide for this ink consumption. This visual guide can be made for these sizes:

4 x 4
6 x 8
10 x 12
14 x 16

These same guides can then be used in the Cost Estimator software.

You will have to select print preferences here in terms of color (i.e., color ink only, white ink only, or combination of both). The software will use these inputs to come out with the tentative cost for the printing job.

Do note that these applications (Garment Creator and Cost Estimator) can easily be downloaded in case you are using a different DTG printer.

I am positive that you are aware that the designs you are getting from your clients vary greatly in its print size. It is quite difficult to pigeonhole these same designs to normal sized templates.

I suggest that what you do here is to use strategic size templates as a reference for your pricing.

Lastly, bear in mind always that the ink used in DTG printing doesn’t all end up on the t-shirt. It is used also during head cleanings and maintenance and portions of it to get lost during the printing process itself.

Remember this when you are worrying as to why there is an imbalance between your ink utilization and a number of t-shirts printed.

Printer Maintenance

Epson F2000 has two components needed for printer maintenance. They are replacement parts for the print head cleaning kit and ink waste cost when doing a white ink tube flush.

I am sure that it would be almost similar to other DTG printers.

The print head cleaning kit costs $100 which is good for 1000 prints. You can use $0.10 on a per item basis as its cost.

The white tube ink flush is not fixed though. I recommend that you set a cost of $ 0.20 per item. This is assuming that you are printing 100 t-shirts per week for a period of 6 weeks. You can adjust this accordingly based on these numbers depending on your shop experience.

Epson F2000 maintenance is always scheduled which greatly helps with its reliability. Just add the cost of this same maintenance to your overhead expenses which I will explain later.

Other Consumables

If you are printing substantially on dark garments, then you will be using pretreat solutions quite often.

You can use the method used in coming up with the ink cost per item for this consumable. You should have been able to come up with this specific number quite easily.

Errors

I am a cautious person and that is why I like to anticipate mistakes happening especially with DTG printing.

Since the printer is doing the brunt of the work here, I always check the first print before proceeding with the rest. If there are lapses, it will usually happen at the first item for the printer setup could be wrong or I placed the garment incorrectly on the printer.

It could also happen during the middle or at the end of the printing run especially when I fail to notice that the printer is running out of ink.

And mistakes are expensive. I will have to dispose of this t-shirt that was erroneously printed on. I also lost some ink during this same printing process.

These things don’t happen often. Just the same, I budget for this by including this in my costs.

An example of this is when the job is for 10 shirts, I compute for 11 shirts and spread the amount across the original order which is 10. I am protecting my bottom line in case a mistake should happen.

Overhead Costs

These are the backbone of your printing operations without which you will have no capability to run a DTG printing business at all.

Sit down, list each of these items if applicable to your shop, and then write down the amount that you are spending for each on monthly basis. Sum them all up when done. This will be your total overhead expense amount per month.

Now, divide this total overhead expense amount with the average number of DTG t-shirts that you will be printing for a month. You will now get your overhead costs per t-shirt per month amount.

I assume that you are running solely a DTG printing shop. If you’re not and there are other printing methods utilized in your shop like screen printing, don’t use these costs per t-shirt per month number.

You will have to proportionally arrive at the allocation of these expenses to the different printing methods in your shop. What I mean here is that these printing methods have to share on the overhead costs amount depending on volume or other factors.

Only then will you be able to have accurate overhead costs per t-shirt per month for DTG printing operations.

Markups

To me, this is the most exciting part of the job when I am doing my cost and pricing work. With this, I can theoretically project how much profit will I be making.

DTG shops usually charge 100% markups for this line of work. If your total cost per item is around $5, you will be billing the customer $10 for it.

I think that this is a fair rate but that it is all up to you if you want to have a higher or lower markup. Depending on your business situation and location, you can adjust this rate accordingly.

I could definitely charge a higher markup but I choose not to.

I am tempered by the fact that DTG printing doesn’t demand a lot of manpower for everything is done by the computer.

There is no setup and cleanup work unlike with screen printing unless you factor in the application of pretreat solution. You can choose just to buy t-shirts that are already pretreated to save time on this work, but it will, of course, be at a premium.

Also, the printing time is substantially less to complete.

This Epson printer can handle 40 light t-shirts or 20 dark t-shirts on an hourly basis. This means that I can print the same quantity of t-shirts and complete it in a substantially lesser amount of time when compared to other printing methods.

I am not shortchanging my customer with this for the output is of good quality. I am giving my client a great value for their money.

While we are on this subject, let me just share with you this Print-On-Demand or (POD) facility of big companies such as Amazon.

These POD providers are a threat to us DTG printers.

They have these online stores in these e-commerce sites which can sell these t-shirts and other products with great designs.

A client of theirs sees these t-shirts inside these stores and orders. These same stores will then ask these POD providers to handle the printing using their designs and shipping the finished product to the customer’s address once done.

We know how big Amazon and these other POD providers are. They can run us out of this business if we are to price our products too high. Keep this in consideration always in your pricing.

Discounts

Just in case that you feel guilty about making too much money with DTG printing, you can always give discounts.

I give discounts first to reputable charitable organizations such as churches, relief efforts, volunteer groups, Girl Scouts, and other related groups. There is no further explanation needed here.

Next, I give discounts to friends and families. They have supported me and are continuing so always.

Companies who have big orders sent regularly get a volume discount. I figured that if I don’t give one, I will lose them to my rivals who are raring to get them from me.

Lastly, clients who have made my life easier by providing me with clear designs that are using the right file formats are also given discounts.

I rationalize this discount that they have saved me time trying to work out their designs for printing. I am incentivizing them so that they will keep on doing this regularly. It is worth it.

When giving discounts, point it out to your clients that you did give them one and show them proof as in the invoice for the job.

This is an effective marketing tool for they would probably spread the word to their own contacts and show this document as proof of the discount given.

I advise newcomers to DTG printing or to the printing business not to give discounts. Instead, give the best service you can by providing quality work and meeting your deadlines. Customers will find appreciate this more than any discounts given.

Pricing Matrices

You may find out that having a pricing matrix will be of immense value to your printing shop. This will lessen errors and put everything in clear light for your employees and customers.

I took it upon myself of coming up with a sample pricing matrix which you can freely adapt depending on your business circumstance. I have incorporated things that I have mentioned earlier in this article here in this pricing matrix.

This is the standard matrix used by almost every DTG printer.

For the next matrix, you will have to explain to your clients here as to why you are charging extra for these type of garments, especially with the dark-colored ones. Tell them that extra time is needed to handle pretreatment, metal foil, and white inks.

This matrix will also take into consideration different products and this extra work.

Additional Charges Per Item	PRICE (per item)
Tank tops	$4
Polo t-shirts	$6
Long sleeved t-shirts	$6
Crewneck t-shirts	$12
Hoodie sweatshirt	$20
2XL & 3XL t-shirts	$5
2XL & 3XL sweatshirts	$7
Second location (back) name	$5
Dark colors with white front	$4
Dark colors with white back	$5

Lastly, this next matrix will handle the matter of charging your customers on the basis of the print area.

Print Size	1 t-shirt		2 to 11 t-shirts		12 to 36 t-shirts
	Light	Dark	Light	Dark	Light	Dark
8 x 10	$21	$26	$16	$20	$15	$18
12 x 10	$21	$26	$17	$22	$16	$20
14 x 16	$21	$26	$19	$24	$18	$22

Customers who are used to screen printing job will definitely find these matrices strange at first. It is your job to educate them on the advantages of DTG printing in terms of time and money saved with the setup and the screens used.

Tell them that instead of these screens, you have to purchase a special printer and inks to undertake the same quality job that they are used to and expect of always. This is the logic as to why these amounts in these matrices appear as they are.