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Here are some answers to questions you might have about starting your own transfer business: What can you produce and sell from your home? Personalized T-shirts, sweatshirts, ball caps, golf shirts, coffee mugs, license plates, mouse pads, coasters, name tags, ceramic tiles, car flags, hitch receiver covers, and much more. We believe T-shirts and coffee mugs are the biggest and most profitable sellers. What do you likely need to produce these things? Heat presses (flat press, mug press and cap press), computer, graphics software, clip art collections, a scanner, an Okidata C3200 or C5200 color laser printer with dye-sublimation toner, White Toner, SoffTee or HotTee transfer paper, release paper, and a source for wholesale blank goods (depending on which items you decide to produce). Why a laser printer and not an ink jet printer? A laser printer is a dry process color source (no wet inks) and can be used for making everything the ink jet with dye-sublimation ink produces, plus can make 50/50 blend T-shirts with no hand. It is much faster at printing (up to 16 full color pages per minute) and never experiences jets getting clogged. The initial investment is very slightly more than ink jet sublimation, but it quickly pay for itself in lower costs per print, using lower cost 50/50 T-shirts will help you sell higher volumes at higher profits, and in higher flexibility since you can produce more items using the laser. How much can you make per hour? That is entirely dependent on what prices you charge for finished goods and how fast you can produce the items. Typically we press about 35 one sided T-shirts per hour and those T-shirts typically cost about $2.10 to produce (T-shirt and transfer). If we get an order for 48 T-shirts, it takes about 2 hours from start to finish (creating the artwork, printing the transfers, pressing the transfers, and folding the T-shirts) to produce them. We charge $6.95 for those T-shirts, so we earn (after direct costs) about $232.80 in those two hours. How much does it cost to get into the business? For an initial investment of around $1550 for a regular format Okidata C3200N color laser printer with dye-sub toner, a JP14 swinger press, and HotTee transfer paper (plus shipping), you can be ready to go with a system. That would give you enough dye-sub toner to make about 1200 T-shirts. What graphics software do we recommend? We use Corel Draw, Paint Shop Pro and Adobe PhotoShop Elements. There are other options, but these work well. You really only require one graphics package, although we have found each is best suited to certain functions, so we have and use all three. Do I need a graphics artist to create my art for me? Yes and no. Most art can be created by scanning existing art or using clip art collections. We have used graphics artists in the past and will use them in the future. Our personal graphics art company is Frank Bailey Graphics. Can I see a real live analysis of pricing and production figures to see if it makes sense for me? For a brief financial summary of how you can buy that system and have the equipment pay for itself in less than 6 months while making a decent living, click here. For further information on how to get started, go to Dye-Sublimation Toner, call (800) 514-3201 or write to image.solutions@earthlink.net. |
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