WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY IF YOU COULD START SCREEN PRINTING ALL OVER AGAIN?

If you have been following Squeegee & Ink for a while, you will know that we have dabbled in many different areas of screen printing and garment decoration. We have experience in flat bed screen printing, garment printing, professional printing for a large customer base and most recently we have started our own clothing brand. 

Our first 10 years of running a professional screen printing studio has been an invaluable experience and we wouldn’t change that… However, if we had the option to start from scratch using the knowlegde we already have, there are a few things that we would do differently.

FIRSTLY : CHOOSE YOUR BUSINESS ROUTE

The absolute most important thing you need to do is understand your audience and the service that you plan to provide. There are an infinite amount of ways to make money via screen printing but we suggest limiting your services to just one area that you excel in.

To make this easy, here are 2 popular routes that we would choose between:

ROUTE ONE Professional screen print studio, printing for customers (B2B)

ROUTE TWO Printing for your own clothing brand (B2C)

Once you have chosen your route, we have some tips for how we would approach each business strategy.

ROUTE ONE: PROFESSIONAL SCREEN PRINTING STUDIO (B2B)

In our opinion, this is the most professional method of making money via screen printing. To succeed you need to be a good screen printer and be even better at customer service. Your standards need to be high and you need to have a good marketing strategy to get enough jobs through the door.

We spent the last 10 years printing for customers and made all the mistakes possible. This is what we would do differently;

1. Buy professional equipment. We would start out with manual printing for the first few years. Once you have an established customer base, make the jump to an automatic press. Doing this will allow you and your staff to understand screen printing on a deeper level while financial obligations are low.
2. Introduce minimum orders. This was our biggest pitfall! It seems wrong to turn a job away but when you run the numbers correctly, you are loosing money on small orders! For manual printing, have a MOQ of at least 20 units per design/colour-way and make sure you are charging enough for screen set up.
3. Hire staff quickly. Cleaning screens, counting shirts, folding, curing… all of these jobs (and more) should be completed by your staff. Ideally you should be running the studio rather than working in it.
4. Standardise everything. Get a good Pantone system, use the same size screens (we use 23″ x 31″), standardise your customer correspondence, use automation, make everything easy and repeatable.
5. Specialise in one type of printing. It’s okay to only print on 100% cotton or only print leavers hoodies. Just make sure you are an expert at that one service. If your customers leave happy then they will come back for more however if you promise a service that you are not confident in, your customers may not be happy with the results.

ROUTE TWO: PRINTING FOR YOUR OWN CLOTHING BRAND (B2C)

We find this to be an extremely enjoyable method of making money via screen printing. In general (and in our opinion) it requires less experience as you can change things along the way, deadlines are not as strict and if you are struggling with something technical, you can make the decision to change or drop a design.

We have owned multiple clothing brands in the past however Blind Maggot Ltd is our current clothing brand that we are working on. Learning from our past mistakes, these are the changes that we have made going forward;

1. Educate yourself. There are a huge amount of educational resources online now. We highly recommend taking a course in screen printing before you purchase any equipment. Try out ‘How to start screen printing your own t-shirts’ for an in depth understanding of the process.
2. Implement profit first. This is a cash management system that helps you to allocate income into different pots of money. Implementing this in your business from the start will help you save for things like corporation tax, VAT and also encourage you to pay yourself correctly. The best profit first accountant in the UK is Annette & Co.
3. Use professional Equipment. We would stick to manual printing at the beginning however as the business progresses, make a plan to either move to automatic printing or outsource your screen printing. For example, you can use your manual equipment to sample new designs before paying a large printing studio to print the main bulk.
4. Have a marketing strategy. Selling online is highly competitive. If you want to understand your customers more thoroughly, find a way of selling in person. Think about market stalls, independent shops, festivals and conventions.
5. Limited edition runs. I’m not sure if this is a good move or not but so far this is working for us. The benefit is that you quickly gain a large selection of designs for customers to choose from. Also customers easily understand that when a product is out of stock it won’t be printed again, resulting in them purchasing a alternative item right away. The negative to limited edition runs is that you quickly gain a mis-match of garment sizes that did not sell. This can be easily fixed by a quick ‘end of year sale’.

WHAT EQUIPMENT SHOULD I PURCHASE AS A NEW SCREEN PRINTER?

If you are following either of the routes above then you will notice they both suggest using ‘professional equipment’. Here is a list of everything we use in our studio which helps us run a successful, manual screen printing studio.

Use our discount code for Screen Print World : CRP5

DO I NEED TO LEARN HOW TO EXPOSE SCREENS?

Not unless you want to. You can purchase ‘pre-exposed screens‘ from Squeegee & Ink, just choose your mesh count, send over your design and we will post your screen with your design already exposed on.

PRE-EXPOSED SCREENS

Check out our latest YouTube video:

Printers Corner is released every Monday at 3pm BST. If you have a question relating to screen printing, let us know by commenting on our videos using #printerscorner  

PLEASE SUPPORT OUR BLOG!
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We fund our blog and YouTube channel by selling our Blind Maggot t-shirts. Please help and support us by purchasing a shirt. As a thank you, we are giving all of our squeegee viewers £10 off our limited edition t-shirts!

GET £10 OFF LIMITED EDITION T-SHIRTS  DISCOUNT CODE : SQUEEGEE

Check out all of the designs here and keep watching our YouTube channel to find out how we printed them: https://www.blindmaggot.co.uk/collections/limited-edition

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