if you're starting a clothing line or expanding your offering into printed apparel in this
video we break down what you need to know before buying a dtg printer to print your own products
i recently had a chance to spend a few days with victor the ceo of omniprint which manufactures
direct-to-garment printers and we got the ins and outs of what it takes to be successful with this
type of equipment in a previous video we covered what goes into running this operation which you
guys will find linked right up above but in this video we not only jump into the financial side of
what you as an entrepreneur can make by printing with dtg we also interview an entrepreneur who
quit his nine-to-five job to pursue the dtg printing industry and has invested his
hard-earned money into starting his own business we hope this video shines some light and helps
you better understand what is involved with dtg so you can make the best investment decision for
your brand and business so if you're a new viewer of our content hit that subscribe button located
right down below to be alerted our future video drops on this channel we bring clarity to business
and help entrepreneurs build brands that impact the world from the ground up let's start this
video off by speaking of victor on what it costs to print t-shirts yourself and realistically how
many you can print per hour on a dtg printer such as the omniprint three jet 330 tx plus
this is oftentimes not discussed guys so get ready to take some notes and do some math to
see if buying equipment like this actually makes sense for you so i want to make some assumption
guys i like making things simple especially math right so we're going to start with like a 15
like street price for your shirts right so uh i don't recommend ever selling anything
lower than that really just because uh you know you got costs you got you got everything there
so you want to make sure you do that so if i'm if i'm thinking about i have a retail price of
15 bucks customized apparel you're looking at a all-in cost at around five dollars right victor
so does the five dollar cost cover the t-shirt blank as well as the ink and pre-treatment
costs is that like or that's what you refer to as all in cost right yeah that includes
pre-treatment uh you know any cleanings and stuff like that that that's needed for your maintenance
that's all in um typically a blank that's a decent blank somewhere around three bucks uh and your ink
cost is is below a dollar on our machines and then we're adding a dollar of you know cleaner margin
uh for pre-treatment those kind of things right all right five dollars for cost
um that's all in for my blank and so that gives me 10 bucks to work with right and it's also a
nice even number and typically with our machines and we like to talk about you know dark shirts
right um you normally have a blended uh orders when you get light shirts and dark shirts uh
but i like to talk about dark shirts because it's what's gonna take longest to to print
produce right so let's say you do 12 shirts an hour right you're at 120 bucks that you're making
um of profit per hour because remember we already took our cost off up here right so that's 120
bucks that you're making per hour uh when you're printing right so that's why i always tell people
when whenever that you're trying to invest in an equipment i want to make sure that you're at
least able to do about five shirts a day right that way that's giving you 50 bucks for the day
and assuming that you're working 20 days that's that's uh you know uh a thousand bucks the math
that victor just shared breaks down a typical cost for printers who are using the direct to garment
method for their designs remember it's important to calculate the cost of ink in this example he
averaged in order to run five dollars per finished product but don't forget that t-shirt blank costs
can vary as not every blank garment is made the same they can range from pennies on a dollar
to a couple of dollars depending on the quality of garment in this example victor went with the
three dollar blank cost which is a common price for a wholesale blank like bella canvases 3001t
wholesalers like bella canvas have a variety of options available to suit your printing needs and
we have included a link in the description right down below where you can check out their offering
now that you know what cost you can expect to print a t-shirt it's also important to discuss
what labor would run to run your operations this is one thing that is often time never mentioned
in dtg printer reviews people like to show how much money they can make without showing you
what it costs to make that money so i think it's important that we cover it right now as a business
owner you need to factor in the time it takes to make a product and set an hourly rate that you
would pay someone else if you hired them to work for you to come up with how much a cost in labor
per finished product you would divide the hourly rate you pay someone in this example 15 per hour
divided by the number of shirts you can produce an hour for this scenario it works out to be a
dollar 25 per shirt in labor cost now the reason you want to factor this into your cost is because
you should be focusing on growing the business and that means hiring people to print for you for this
example we round it down to five dollars all in cost including the labor with a ten dollar profit
to make the math easy to follow but knowing your all in printing costs is only half the battle guys
the next thing you need to know is how profitable can you be with direct-to-garment printing
after factoring in your equipment purchasing costs let's dive into that answer now
i want to break this down super easy right so if i have a payment for my machine my equipment that's
550 bucks a month right and i'm saying i'm making 10 on every shirt now i know that for my month so
i can cover i gotta make 55 shirts 20 working days assuming you're not working the weekends
it's about it's a little bit under three shirts right so i need three shirts a day three a day
three orders a day to make sure that i got my my payment covered if you're starting up it's fine
but you gotta you gotta realize i need to make sure that i'm i'm prepping myself i'm doing my
samples you know i'm putting my site up uh while your equipment's on the way make sure you have
that up so you can start selling right you get your training and then you start selling make sure
you have your your your finances covered right so it's always super important to do your numbers
guys now the statement he ended this piece with is crucial here guys you need to have a demand for
the orders in order to meet at least three jobs per day to break even on the equipment cost alone
if you're working 20 days a month that means that if you're not at the point of where you're
selling at least three garments per day on your own through your own e-commerce website then you
should create a demand before making an investment into equipment like this on the flip side if your
orders have already surpassed the capability of one machine and you find yourself not being able
to print all your orders in one day you should highly consider investing into a second machine
to help you become efficient and profitable ways to improve your efficiency with print on demand
include pre-treating your blanks and storing them away so you can keep the printers running
every single minute of every single hour the goal to becoming profitable with direct-to-garment
printing is to become efficient in your operation the more you can print per hour the more you
can make per day and ultimately the more you can profit per year omniprint also has options such as
a cheetah for print shop owners who are producing thousands of garments per week this has a
completely different cost but if the order volume is there it's an option that's worth exploring now
with any piece of technology there are learning curves guys the machine doesn't do everything
for you there are a variety of factors that go into operating a direct-to-garment business from
the pre-treat to the garments you select and the artwork that you have and the customers that you
work with for this reason i wanted to introduce you guys to gabriel who is the co-owner of gush
apparel and he agreed to share his experience in owning an omniprint printer he shares the reality
and true cost of running a dtg business from leaving a six-figure job as an operations manager
to starting a print-on-demand business he shares the truth about the journey into entrepreneurship
hi guys i'm gabriel lapera i'm one of the owners of gush apparel i want to welcome you guys and
show you a little bit about our operation so i feel that the heart of any business is
your great customers but the brain of it is this bad boy right here our omniprint free jet 330 tx
um this is how we're able to achieve you know the beautiful prints that we're able to achieve
now what runs this bad boy which is in essence the command center is what's called the rip software
this software is provided by omniprint and here in essence in this command center there's so
many things that you can manipulate from size of the print color strength placement of the print
now other tools that we use that don't necessarily run the printer but are
needed to be able to do your job is a heat press and a pre-treat machine now the heat
press which is also provided in your package for mommy print when you purchase a machine
is the stahls heat press now this is needed not only to dry your pre-treat which is pre-treat is
what you have to put on the shirt in order for the color to actually adhere when you're fused
infusing it into the garment and you also need it when you're curing when you're done printing
and making sure now that the color the design set into the shirt now let me show you guys some of
examples of the finished product of the beautiful prints that you can achieve with this machine
now one thing i've gotten into more and more lately i like like color coordinating a lot of
things right so lately we've been getting to a lot of combining designs to match people's kicks so
we're probably now on our like fifth uh version of different uh kicks that we're matching for people
with the designs that they want um another thing i like printing a lot i believe a lot
in positive mind and positive thoughts is you know positive type quotes here on this long sleeve camo
we have where it says a positive mind and a steady ground grind until something happens i i truly
believe that in terms of how long the garments take it could range anywhere from 45 seconds
to about seven minutes depending if it has a lot of detail on the actual design i got into
this business and i knew zero about it i had never done it i had never worked at a print shop i would
not recommend you to do that but that pretty much falls in line with everything i've ever
done in my life really at the time i was a vp of operations and i was making six figures and
most who knew me would have kind of thought you should be happy you know you never went to college
you barely made it out of high school so to get to where i had gotten i should have just kind
of been happy with the money and and i guess the position and of what i had achieved but
honestly i've been at that point about 13 years and being in operations management and i just
i was no longer fulfilled i just it's not what i wanted to do anymore so
i had just recently married my best friend cindy right so i've been maybe a few weeks into marriage
and i tell her that i no longer want to do this that i want to quit my job and not only
quit my job i was doing something that i had never done before which is quit my job without
having another one lined up i have no idea how she ended up saying yes but she had my back and
and you know we did you know i quit now my initial plan was i'm gonna quit take a break and kind of
get back into operations you know i just needed a break while i was on that break i started googling
businesses you can do from your home in doing so i came across printing video screen printing videos
and then i actually ran into one of john's videos with omniprint on dtg printing started doing some
research i was very intrigued by the process everything i've ever done work-wise has pretty
much been how i just explained which is i knew zero and whatever i was getting into but the one
big difference now is i was going to get into something that i didn't know with not making
any money in the beginning and trying to figure it out as i went plus on top of everything else
investing into dtg printing and machinery for it is a bit costly so now i have to go to that same
wife and tell her hey what do you think about me taking the last of the money that we have
and investing it into these machines so i could do this from home now at the same time i was also
having a comfort uh conversation with my childhood friend brandon gomez and i guess
like cindy they both believed in my work ethic my that when i put my time and energy into something
i'm relentless and so he said to me you know what about i become your partner and i help you with
the financial burden and just like that between the conversation with my wife and my partner
gush was born obviously even though gush was born
the owner of gosh knew nothing about the business knew nothing about a powerprint thing
now the one thing that i feel blessed is that i made the decision to start with dtg and the reason
i say that is i've had the opportunity to work in screen printing a bit and to me the learning
curve and learning let's say screen printing versus dtg is much smaller there's way more
steps in screen printing it's just to me it's more difficult so the the fact that i was able to learn
quicker i think was a big advantage in me choosing dtg but not only that again since
i knew nothing i i didn't have any clients lined up i didn't have any big commercial contracts so
i think that's another thing where dtg helps where dtg allows you to do a print of a single shirt
where you can't do that with screen printing it is not cost effective there's too many steps involved
so that's why usually screen printers have the kind of minimums that they have so
with dtg allowing me to do whether it be a single shirt or until i build up for bigger clients
it that flexibility of doing the smaller count runs is is also a blessing because you're able
to do one-offs until you start getting your name out there now something else that i'd
like to touch on you know i think here we're discussing a lot of like good points and benefits
of dtg printing i would be doing it a disservice if i didn't speak on maybe some of the bad like
hurdles or or stuff that's frustrated me along the way and i think that's beneficial because i know
someone may see this video that was me two and a half years ago and it would have been
real helpful to come across more videos of the things that can go wrong or things you need to
learn so for example a person like me who knew nothing about this industry and had to learn
everything and i'm not talking about just printing i'm i'm talking about how to incorporate how to if
you're going to have an online store how to create your online store how to market and get clients
you know i did all mostly all my research you know on youtube and thank god many of the videos
that i used were john's videos because he doesn't just talk about dtg printing he kind of discusses
all the things you need to start a business so and not only his videos but his from the ground up
academy have been instrumental in helping me along the way as well as you know victor has a lot of
good one-on-one creators podcasts trainings uh with omniprint that obviously helped me
as well learn the aspect of the printing part so if you're thinking about doing this i would say
the first thing is research everything involved to start your business but then on top of that
once you have that all written down what parts of that you know
and what you don't and then start researching the parts that you don't know how to do and again
reach out to these sources like john order victor or what i call youtube university and maybe even
seek out a mentor maybe finding someone local to you and that can help you along the way where you
could learn from their mistakes i think that would be a very beneficial asset and this way they can
help you avoid wasting the amount of time and money that i did along the way making my mistakes
to summarize on helping your decision making the key takeaway in this video is do not buy equipment
to start a direct-to-garment business unless you are fully ready to go all in and have the patience
and the perseverance to live this out despite the hurdles that will come your way
if this isn't you then you should consider outsourcing your job to people like gabriel with
gush apparel who is linked in the descriptions down below print shops like gabriel are here to
assist entrepreneurs to start and grow their brands and they have the patience to get the
job right so you could focus on designing and marketing your brand and if you're beyond the
step of starting and you want to grow by actually making your own products then check out the direct
to garment printers that is offered by omniprint in the links down in the descriptions down below
they create products to help entrepreneurs win in this industry and i personally enjoyed my time at
the omniprint headquarters and i learned a lot about operations from the men victor pena during
that trip they are on a growth trajectory and have some exciting product lines to be on the
lookout for but more than anything he taught me that having patience and a strong vision for the
future is what is needed to continue to succeed for that i am super grateful for and i know
that you guys are in good hands if you decide to start a dtg printing business with their equipment
and if you'd like to learn more about the apparel industry in general check out the series we
created called from the ground up linked in the cards here and i'll see you guys in the next
video