How to Make Money Silk Screen Printing

Make money printing

Everyone wants to make more money, and everyone wants help when there is a
problem.  Stop and think about it.  What do you do to make more money
and solve problems compared to what others do?

Every day is a busy day with plenty of work to do, phones that ring, people to talk with,
and hardly a moment to consider how decisions are being made.  We all
react to circumstances in which we find ourselves.  We need something.  We
buy it at the lowest cost from the closest supplier to minimize shipping costs.

Look again, and we might find that low cost is actually the highest cost.  We see
these kinds of mistakes every day.  You need white ink to print on black
shirts.  If the supplier sends you a white that is not bleed resistant,
and you print on 50-50 maroon, red or green shirts, that inexpensive ink could
turn pink or green.  The job could come back from the customer costing
a lot more than another ink or ink from another supplier. 

If the supplier sells the ink without asking what the ink will be printed on, or without
asking how the ink will be printed, you could be printing, flash curing and
printing again to get a bright image rather than using a retensionable screen,
capillary film, and some other suggestions to get a bright image with one pass
of the squeegee and no flash.  Eliminating that flash can be the difference
between printing 30 shirts per hour or 100-120 shirts per hour, or 300-400%.  So
the cost of ink is not just the ink, but rather what you get or don’t
get with the ink.

Liquid emulsion costs less than capillary film.  Therefore, a business will
be more profitable using liquid emulsion.  Well, it is true liquid per
square inch costs less than capillary film, but purchase cost is not total
cost.  You don’t work for free (I hope), and there are overhead
costs.  So which product can you get on and off the screen faster?  With
proper instruction, the answer is clearly capillary film.  Just roll the
film down the screen while spraying water up the screen.  There are no
scoop coaters to clean.  You don’t coat one side, then the other,
and so forth.  Just measure the time required, and film saves time. 

Pin holes come from dust in liquid emulsion.  Capillary is applied to a wet screen,
and so there is no dust to create pin holes.  No production time is lost
to repairing pin holes.  Capillary film is also only applied to the image
area rather than most of the screen.  So less film product is used.  Again,
purchase cost has to be added to ownership costs to find out which will be
the lowest total cost.  That is how street smart decisions are made by
other shops.

When help is required, how is help selected?  How do we know that the person providing
the help is qualified?  Everyone has opinions on many subjects.  Someone
qualified either has to have been trained by another qualified person, or has
to have examined all the options to select the best option.  The trouble
is we don’t know if our advisor has been well trained or completed the
research.  The street smart solution is to look at the work of the advisor.  Has
the advisor produced the level of work we want to produce?  Let the advisor
demonstrate his or her credentials.  That will sort out talkers from those
who can actually do the work we want to do.

When we have good people working with us in the shop we do a better job.  When
we have a supplier who does more than harvest money, we cut costs, increase
revenue, and solve problems.