I have always been of the opinion that the most important component to any successful Indianapolis T-shirt printing company is the ability to sell it. Over the past five or 10 years, I have noticed a significant increase in the amount of brand new Indianapolis screen printing companies. I have also noticed that many of them do not last very long. They are here today and gone tomorrow. There is undeniably a huge market for this because all you have to do is walk down the street and look at people walking down the street and see that they are wearing custom t-shirts and caps. The majority of them are wearing something with a custom embroidery or a screen printing application. I realize that from the perspective of someone that doesn’t have any experience in this field that it looks easy. That being said, there’s a lot to it.

I have always been one to think that in order to do our job properly you need to have the right tools, especially if you’re going to work with them every day. You don’t have to go out and buy a brand-new state-of-the-art equipment at least not until you have clientele to keep that machinery running constantly. These items are extremely expensive. Take a digital T-shirt printing machine for example. These things can be up to $15,000 and that’s only for a one unit at a time application. I can remember when I was just starting out . I started my business in my garage. This gave me the advantage of not having the traditional overhead that most start up companies incur. I also started with a used four-color press that I got for a fraction of the cost that a new one would’ve been. Keep in mind that you can only get so much production out of the manual press compared to an automated one. However, when you’re just starting out, you really don’t have clientele established yet at that point. so who needs a machine that can output over 400 T-shirts an hour anyway? A lot of people who try to break into this industry don’t realize that there is a huge learning curve. There is a lot more to putting out a superior product than just owning a fancy equipment. You need to know how to use it properly.

There is no substitute for hands-on experience. You can watch someone work as an experienced operator for days. They make it look easy because they have been doing it for a long time and have many years of experience behind them. Why would somebody want to burden themselves with making a huge monthly payment before they have the work to back it up? On the other hand, you need to have what is referred to as balance. It doesn’t matter how fast you can sell orders, if you can’t get them processed in time. What further complicates things is that so many of our Indianapolis screen printing and embroidery clientele have requirements that are extremely time sensitive. We like to have at least two weeks to process an order but often that is just not realistic. For example, a lot of people don’t even call us until five days before they actually need them. At this point, we’re scrambling in order to get them done in time.