“Just push a button and watch this machine make money.” I promise you, that was the bold statement right there underneath a video presentation on the web site of a Canadian distributor promoting a brand of digital tee-shirt printers.
The video of a black tee-shirt being printed on the inkjet printer was presumably designed to convince everyone that it is finally possible to produce reasonable digital prints on dark shirts. Down in the left-hand corner of the video image they kindly provided a running stopwatch to prove that the print only takes 3 1/2 minutes.
ONLY three and a half minutes? For ONE print? Not counting the time taken to load and unload? Well yes, and you are right, we should add in 30 seconds for loading, clamping, unclamping and unloading. So let’s call it only 4 minutes per print. Now we need some quick math to do a production projection… and the answer is… a maximum production rate of 15 prints an hour!
Hard to tell too much about the design from the video, but we know that it is a straight-forward print with no special effects because direct-to-shirt inkjet printing cannot do special effects. By contrast with the digital printing rate of 15 an hour without special effects, automatic screen printing can produce the same print with special effects at the rate of between 500 and 1,000 per hour.
“Fifteen shirts an hour?” you ask again. How does that pay the bills? I don’t know. You do the math this time. Start with the machine. It costs anything from $8,500.00 for a “refurbished” model to $19,715.00 for the new and latest model. And we are not talking about a top-of-the-line brand here. According to the same web site, the ink will run you anything from $347.00 per liter (that’s about the size of a quart) to $519.20 per liter depending upon the size of container that you buy. That, by the way, works out at somewhere between $1,450.00 and $2,100.00 per gallon. Then there is the labour to run the machine at, let’s say, $15.00 per hour (or $1.00 per print).
See the problem? If you are a wholesaler or contract printer, you know the going rate in your market for a print on a dark shirt, and you also know that it will barely pay just the labour cost at 15 prints per hour. How are you going to pay for the other direct costs like the machine, the expensive ink, maintenance and repairs? How are you going to pay the overheads and make a profit? Exactly! I don’t know either. And we haven’t yet begun to talk about problems with lint and other issues typical of a textile production environment.
But let’s say that you are not a contract printer, that you are instead a retailer, or better still, you intend selling directly over the internet for the going rate of anything from about $5.00 to $12.00 per shirt. In that case you might be able to justify the high cost of the digital print, but then you had better be selling a fairly high volume. Before splashing out $8,000.00 to $20,000.00 on a single-station inkjet tee-shirt printer you should be pretty sure that you can do the volume to justify the expense. I’m sure that you would be realistic enough to expect others to also be chasing that volume. How many others? You might want to Google “custom tee shirts” and review the 240,000 entries by your potential competitors.
For our textile screen printing customers, the vast majority of whom are contract printers and not retailers, “Just push the button and watch this machine make money” might just sound a little far-fetched once they have done the math.
Got a comment? Think I’m full of it? Email me at michael@screenflex.ca