New Guy

etide08

Hello to all. Me and my partner are new to this screen printing business, well i am at least my partner has some good general knowledge of the business. My question is do we need to start out with some fancy machine or can we get by with a basic used machine and dryer. If you guys have any info that would be great as well as some sites that give us some basic description on how it's done, etc. Thanks in advance for your time.
Eric

BFS

It's as easy as 123:

1. Find yourself a good local printer.
2. Buy your own shirts and dropship them to local printer.
3. Let local printer print your shirts for you.

Work on selling shirts first. Once you've got a few grand rolling through every month, buy a used manual press and other cheap equipment.

Sales is the most essential driving force behind any business, and is especially the case with screenprinting where you're competing with literally HUNDREDS (yes, HUNDREDS) of competitors in your local area alone.

Only once you're succeeding with sales, should you consider manufacturing to increase your margins... Unless you're just doing this for fun, in which case you can go about this any way you want.

This is my advice to you...


Stoic

lensman_1

Hello New Guy. http://www.digitsmith.com/images/icons/icon14.gif

I just wanted to say that Stoic's advice could not be more honest or to the point.

I once had a dream of doing screen printing, bought equipment, set up shop and tried hard to make everything look great.

But I had underestimated the amount of work/number of t-shirts you had to print before you had any (real) money coming in!!! And how little money/value people were willing to pay me for the nice looking work. One guy even brought in some of his old USED shirts and wanted them printed for free, "since I was already printing his design on some new shirts, it would be easy to slip in a few of his old ones ? "." ? .........

Be VERY wary of this type of customer who want "just a few" things for "free".

Give them their stuff and show them the door, quickly, and move on to someone who values your time !

If you ain't doing this just for fun, make sure the money is rolling in first, before you put any substantial investment into your own equipment.

I wish you much good luck, but remember Stoic's advice.

Lensman_1

Ghostwork Ink

Hey!

Here's the way I did it..
I shopped around for a rather cheap press, in my case i bought a old atlas 6color 4station press for 1k off a guy, the guy told me nothing about my press... you may think thats a bad thing, but i found it helpful in a way. I assembled the press discovered new things about it every day.
From there i was taking orders for 1 color designs, doing real simple stuff.. As i made the money i kept saving for new equipment.
Basically my whole line up was the Atlas press, a sheet of CLEAN glass to weigh my design down on the screens, a 500watt halogen light, and a flash dryer i later bought.
Of course now i upgraded all of my equipment after making the money off that.
the bottom line is start out small and work your way up to the top; I started screen printing when i was 14, im now 19 and i own a whole print shop in PA.

hope that helped out!