3 Things You Must Know
About Pad and Screen Printing Before
Starting a Home Printing Business

This article is designed to show businesses how to make money by offering promotional products to their customers and also to help those already selling promotional products to be more effective.

There are nearly a dozen companies in the genre of "business opportunity sales" in the field of specialty printing. And many of these companies selling various pad and screen printing machines as a "home-business" opportunity are not giving you all the information you really need to make an educated decision about whether a home printing business makes sense for you and your family.

The purpose of this report is to give you the whole story, so that if you do decide to do printing in your home, you will more fully understand the scope of what you are doing and how it might impact your family.

The Three Lies About "Home-Based" Pad Printing

There are 3 areas where you are either lied to or not told the "whole truth" that you need to know about before printing in your home. We call these "half-truths".

The reality is that they are lies.

Is the purpose of these lies and half-truths malicious? Probably not. Often they are said by salespeople only telling you what they have been told to tell you. But the bottom line, the real purpose of these half-truths, is to separate you from your money. Please don't believe us—check it out for yourself by going to the web site links in this report. Here is our brief summary of the information reported at all these industry web sites.

The productivity claims you hear promoting how you can print 200-300 items/products per hour is very deceiving. This can be true if you are experienced, if you are printing in only one-color and if you only consider the printing step; but that's not the whole story.

You will hear companies tell you that you can make "$200 per hour printing" using this rationale. But the truth is that maybe 20% of your total time on a small order is the actual printing step. You have artwork to deal with, plate making, setup, printing, cleanup and delivery to consider. All of these things need to be factored in as you measure "productivity," or you will not get the whole story, the more truthful story.

If you calculate your total profit considering only the printing step, of course it looks like you are making lots of money. And that's the point of telling you the half-truth. In reality, you are making much less per hour, all things considered, if you just do the math. And that's the truth.

For example, if you can make $200/hour printing like "they" say and it takes 1 hour for the actual printing and 4 hours for everything else, calculate it properly. $200 divided by the total of 5 hours to do the job comes out to $40 per hour you make while working on the actual order. That's a far cry from $200 per hour. And now we are closer to the real truth.

Another consideration concerns the printing of glass and ceramics. Mugs are a popular product. But there is even more to consider (things you are not told) relating to printing mugs. Home-based pad printing equipment, by its own limitations, can print only 30% of a curved surface.

To create a more appealing mug, two "opposite" imprints often become necessary, which not only increases your cost, but also greatly lengthens the time to produce a finished product. (Note also that home-based pad printing systems cannot do the "full wrap" type of printing that is the most popular with the customers.) Now your production time and labor costs go up considerably.

Another major factor to consider is the "curing" time for mugs. Hardeners are added to the inks for glass and ceramics. And these mixtures need to be "heat-cured" in order to become commercially permanent. In all likelihood, the equipment you are considering for a home printing business does not come with a dryer system, which means, in a home-based environment, you will be forced to use your household oven.

If you can cure only 36 mugs (optimum), for example, in your home oven at one time, the mugs have to be placed in the oven in a very timely fashion to facilitate the curing process. This, then, becomes the major limiting factor. The speed of "curing ink" must be considered as well as the "printing" speed to be fair to the entire job. Were you told this? Probably not.

Let's look to another serious issue regarding producing printed products.

You are often led to believe that "artwork" is a fairly simple issue. That's true if you understand artwork and how to manipulate it. If you don't, handling artwork can be the most difficult problem you face. According to the industry's trade association, PPAI (www.ppa.org), 95% of all distributors say their biggest problem is dealing with the artwork.

What that means is that your customer most often does not have camera-ready art to give you. And if this is the case, you are the one left to solve the problem. So, this leaves you with several options. You can "hire" it done by using the services of a graphic artist, or you can try to fix their artwork yourself once you have mastered graphic art software.

Oddly, the temptation is to do it yourself, but in reality, this further reduces the worth of your time. If you choose to "fix" the artwork yourself, understand that the graphic arts software can be a lot harder to learn than how to operate the printing equipment.

$200 per hour printing in small quantities can sound quite enticing, yet the profits from "brokered orders" can easily make that look like chump change. The greatest and most trouble-free profits come from brokering the orders and having real factories do the printing.

Let's refer to mugs, once again. "Biz-Op" companies will tell you that you can buy a blank mug for $1, print it and sell it for $3-$5. But why would you want to do that when, for example, one of our suppliers recently sent us a "distributor-only" offer for 144 mugs that you can buy for 49¢ imprinted with a full wrap print? When you can buy the finished product for less than ½ the cost of a blank mug, why would you print it yourself? However, to entice you to buy their equipment, you are not told about this part of the industry.

That's why we don't print and why we believe you shouldn't, either.

The supplier side (factories) of our industry offers specials throughout the year to qualified distributors that can literally save you thousands of dollars each year, making you hundreds of dollars more on orders you don't print.

Using the "distributor-only" offer for 144 mugs, look how much more competitive you can be. The regular retail catalog price is only $1.49, less 49¢ cost (which is much better for your customer). This means you make $1 per mug or $144.00 on an order you don't touch. How much more competitive can you be against a manual pad printer? They can't sell 144 mugs for $1.49 apiece. And the real question to ask is, whose customer gets the greatest value?

Your choices are obvious. You can "print" the order, or you can "broker" the order. One takes hours to complete, the other takes about an hour to complete. The money is in the orders, not the printing. That is the "truth" you are not told.

A friend who has had a pad printer for 7 years explained that it often easily takes an entire day to go through the process of printing 144 "2-color" mugs. With a total cost of $1.00 (for the blanks) and a selling price even as low as $3.00 each, the profit is $288.00, or $36.00/hour, for 8 hours of work.

If, instead, you "brokered" the order to the factory, as she has now done for over 6 years, and even if it took a full hour to complete the purchase order and send in the artwork, at the catalog price of $1.49 with a cost of only 49¢ each, the profit is $1.00 per mug. You've just earned $144.00/hour with no mess or fuss.

When you discover which is best for your customer you also discover which is best for yourself. And that's the truth!

I don't know about you, but I'd rather make more money with less work—if you send the order to a factory you have 7 hours left in the day to get another order. Hmmm...If you print it yourself you spend the whole day producing the order. Hmmm... That is really what your choice is about. Brokering is ALWAYS more profitable than printing. But, experience has taught us that you are never told that fact.

Even worse, if you are going to print products, you have to inventory the blank goods—and if Murphy's Law is right—the customer will always want something you do not have in stock. This means more inventory. And, what about rejects? When you print, especially in multiple colors, you will make rejects, and probably on each order. To be accurate, you need to calculate rejects into your total cost, too.

There are two adages said of our business. "He who controls the artwork, controls the customer." And, "He who does the printing, owns the mistakes." Both are equally true. Your clients will not tolerate less than professional results. If you own the printer, you own the mistakes.

To see for yourself how many people find out about all this too late after buying a home printing business, go to eBay and search for "used pad-printing equipment". There are hundreds of used home-type pad printers for sale because of these points.

But what if you really want to print? Then understand what you are letting yourself in for. Which equipment should you buy? How much should you pay? Do you realize that there are commercial printing systems that are automated that cost less than the hobby systems that are being offered by "biz-op" companies? It's true, and some research on your part will bear this out.

There are multiple factories in this industry offering commercial equipment. The price range for equipment like this varies according to the printer specifications. One- and two-head (color) systems will cost less than four-head systems. However, professional quality equipment will still cost you only from $3,000 to $5,000 for "commercial" quality automated systems. Do the research before you buy.

Digital equipment's primary use is for making "digital personalized prototypes" (samples), with your prospect's logo and business information printed on the sample in full color.

Common sense indicates that "full color" has a greater advertising impact than does one or two colors. Yet even with smaller quanity orders, products produced digitally are extra-profitable because there are no "negatives" associated with the production.

It is virtually impossible to produce one- or two-color personalized samples using pad printing or screen printing effectively or profitably, because of the negatives (plate-making, screen-making, setup, registration, cleanup, etc.)

To produce personal samples with pad or screen printing is time consuming, costly, and in the long run, not worth the effort for the impact it makes for the obvious reasons we've stated. But what you are told is that all of the above is simple and fun, so easy that a child can do it. And if you believe that...

Some of the biggest problems that both beginning printers and experienced printers have in common are registration of the colors to each other, getting proper placement on the product being printed, and ink adhesion. To print properly, you need a temperature and humidity controlled environment with special equipment to vent fumes and eliminate the dust that can ruin a print job.

Were you told that?

In home environments, you cannot control the temperature to be between 68-72 degrees, with humidity at 55%. Venting out the fumes with doors and windows open (as is sometimes suggested), makes it impossible to control these factors. In addition, if you store the materials you are printing in your garage, they need to be "brought to room temperature" in the printing environment to maximize the printing. If these conditions are not controlled, the printing process will be impaired.

Once again we talk about ceramic mugs and glassware. These are popular items for the pad printing industry. What is often not adequately explained is the "curing" process for these products once they are printed.

These items are printed with a mixture of inks, solvents and hardeners that need to "cure" to become a commercially viable product. How do you cure them? Well, if your program doesn't come with a dryer unit of some type, as some suppliers offer, your only option is to cure them in your household oven.

When ink dries (cures), approximately 60% of the ink volume used is solvents that evaporate in the oven in the curing process. These vapors should be vented outside, as they are not safe to breathe. Do you really want to be in the kitchen as these mugs cure?

Do you really want to cook food in an oven that just evaporated the solvents off 144 mugs for the whole day?

You can of course, buy a curing oven with proper ventilation and run the ventilation tubes out through your walls, but most people don't want to pay an extra $2,000-$4,000 to do that. (Because laws vary from state to state and even county to county, should you decide to move towards a commercial operation in your home, you need to check with your homeowner's insurance for the zoning in your community and consider the safety issues.) (Note: these things you are not told either.)

Let's talk about plastic products for a moment. There are "special" things to be concerned with relating specifically to some plastics. For instance, were you told you have to "flame treat" some types of plastic with a torch before the ink will adhere? If you flame treat too long, you risk burning the product, not long enough and the ink will not adhere. Essentially, you are "melting" the plastic long enough to change it molecularly to accept the ink. Great care needs to be taken in this process, because the fumes that come off melting or burning plastic are toxic.

Lastly, what about the printing inks? Are you told that the inks are safe for home use? Or are you told that the MSDS ("Material Safety Data Sheet"Ñguidelines recommended by the ink manufacturers) recommends the using of commercial quality rubber gloves, not household plastic gloves, in handling the ink? The solvents used with the inks will ruin household type gloves very quickly. It is recommended to contact a glove manufacturer and let them suggest which gloves to buy based on the inks and solvents you will be using.

Usually, "biz-op" companies will not tell you these things, either.

For a more complete discussion of the inks, read our report: Using Printing Inks in Home Businesses.

How About Screen Printing?

Most of the same points mentioned about pad printing also apply to screen printing. Screen printing can actually be more profitable than pad printing, but when you compare what it costs to print a shirt vs. what it costs to buy one from a factory, you have the same problem as with pad printing. All things considered, it often is more profitable to "job out" (broker) the order to a local screen printer for a wholesale price.

There is a distinction between the industries of screen printing and pad printing and promotional products. Screen printing is an "open" industry, in that anyone can buy from the suppliers, and anyone can buy the equipment; all that is needed is proper business licenses.

The promotional products industry differs in that the suppliers are "closed" to the public, and it requires you to have an industry license to receive full profit and benefits from the industry.

Even if you have pad-printing equipment, you are still not connected DIRECTLY to the industry with your own distributor number. Screen printing is a much easier industry to enter. And locally, in virtually all markets, you will find many screen printers who will give you contractor's pricing on your orders. Knowing this fact should help you gain better understanding of whether you really want to bring the screen-printing process to your home.

Profitability Analysis - Let's look at two examples, one that is two-color printing on a shirt and the other with a four-color process print of a photographic type image.

Two-color shirt: Companies that offer you a business opportunity screen printing from your home often offer "hobby" equipment, much the same way pad printers for the home are not serious, commercial printing equipment, either.

Whenever you are utilizing "hobby" type equipment, you will never be able to compete for business with people who have commercial equipment. Their systems are set up for production regardless of the size of an order.

With a home-based screen-printing business, just to get everything in place to produce your orders can be a major undertaking. And then, when you are done, everything has to be cleaned up and put away until the next order. Plus, you should be prepared to dedicate a serious amount of square footage in your home to adequately set up your screen-printing shop.

The essentials of home-based screen-printing production include artwork concerns, screen preparation, making the screens, registration, cleanup and screen reclaiming. All of these things have labor and costs, indirect or otherwise, that affect the total production cost of your shirts. The costs of these things are never fully disclosed by the salespeople who sell you their equipment.

Instead, here is what you are told:

Your shirt will cost $2 total and will sell for approximately $8 printed in one color (two color will sell for approximately $10). You are also told that you can print 40 shirts an hour for a gross profit of $320 per hour. Subtract from that your cost of $80, (40 shirts x $2 cost), and you will realize a profit of $240 per hour. Just like with pad printing, these "production factors" need to be considered, as they directly affect and reduce your bottom line.

If it takes one hour to print, and four hours for everything else, your hourly profit has been reduced to less than $50 per hour. Once again, we are closer to the real "undisclosed" truth.

Here's why we prefer to work with local screen printers, and why you should too. For example, we have a commercial screen-printer in Colorado who does contract printing jobs for companies just like yours and ours at wholesale pricing. Contract screen printers can be found in just about every community in the nation.

This is a typical wholesale "contractor's" price list for screen-printing:

Two very large industry suppliers (San Mar and TriMark) regularly offer White 100% cotton T's for 99¢ each in small quantities.

Your cost to "broker" a 2-Color White T-Shirt in a quantity of 13-24 is:

If you decided to print this order yourself, what would the numbers look like? Well, previously we said that you are told that your cost was approximately $2 per shirt, including ink, emulsion, etc. Using 13 shirts as our example, 13 times $2 equals $26 in costs. If you sell the shirts for $10 each, you gross $130 for the shirts, less the cost of $26 for a profit of $104 (assuming you didn't have any misprints.)

To earn this much money could easily involve three or four hours of your time. Divided backwards means that this order really produced $26 – $35 per hour profit.

How much would you make if you simply brokered the order to your contract printer? Let's see: $10 retail, less $2.74 cost equals a profit of $7.26 per shirt, times 13 shirts equals a total profit of $94.38. And this order could be handled in less than an hour! Once again, even with very small orders, there is much more money to be made by brokering orders when you consider all the factors, than to print orders, even in the screen-printing industry.

We also teach a pricing formula for brokering orders that essentially doubles your actual costs up to 150 shirts. This formula will always allow you to be very competitive and profitable, and remember, these are for orders you are not printing yourself. You are simply handing them over to your contract printer.

Here is a story from one of our operators that proves the point that there is more money to be made brokering orders than printing them, even if you are competing against very large screen-printing houses. This is even truer if you are competing against smaller companies who use hobby equipment, too.

"We got the bid for the State of Colorado when the Millennium Tree Project was launched in 2000. We did all the t-shirts, mugs & Christmas ornaments for this national project. We were told that we beat the prices of some of the biggest screen-print shops in the state. We brokered the entire order."

Look at this price for 2,500 shirts:

"Our closest competitor bid the shirts at $5.50 each and they owned 4 automatic presses and had 60 employees! We had no employees and no overhead! Our complete program with the State of Colorado netted us over $45,000 over a 4-month period of time. This was the first year we earned over $80,000 from Creative Concepts of America, and we still operated our business part time." Gail L., Creative Concepts of America, Colorado

4-color process: This is not recommended for home equipment due to the difficulty in getting the printing registration and color separations exact. If you attempt it yourself with a shirt you buy for $1.00, you'll use approximately 60¢ per color for ink and emulsion and have a total cost of $3.40 per shirt. Hobby equipment will not allow you to do the full-color separations for your screens, so your customer will have to pay $200-$300 for color separations done by a professional graphics company.

If you purchase 100 shirts at $1.00 per shirt, add 60¢ per color (x 4) to print; the final material cost of the shirt is $3.40. But your customer's final cost per shirt, including the artwork charge, would be $5.40 per shirt.

If you go to www.imagewearcolor.com you can buy digitally printed shirts at a 72-piece minimum for $5.95 on a "C" discount—which means your actual cost is $3.57 plus a set up of $55. Your actual cost on the set up is only $44. Assuming a production run of 100 pieces the total cost per shirt is only $4.01. So why do it yourself if you can buy it for less?

Production Considerations

Though screen-printing does not require your home oven to cure the ink, there are a number of issues you may want to consider that are specific to screen printing.

The Bottom Line

Screen and pad printing are actually very effective methods to print on various types of products, when done in a commercial environment, with commercial equipment and standard industrial safety procedures. This is why the industry has been doing this type of printing since 1902.

These processes are not practical for home use.

We definitely recommend selling screen-printed and pad-printed products, but only when printed by real factories. Remember, you can buy the products from the factories for less than the cost of making them yourself, all things considered. And it is important to consider all of these factors, even though you are generally not informed of these concerns.

So here's a thought: when you discover there is no wisdom in owning equipment, just think how much more money you will earn and how much more time you will save by brokering the orders to someone else who has already made that investment. Remember the axiom previously mentioned: "He who owns the printer, owns the mistakes." Better to transfer that risk to someone else.

Research Before You Decide

If you still plan to get involved with a home printing business, take the time to learn a bit more about what is really involved. Read between the lines. Ask pointed questions. Try to understand the motivations of the seller and your motivations for being the buyer.

Ask yourself the question, if the seller really disclosed the "inside" of what they are offering, and fully told you the "truth," would you really buy it?

That's the purpose of this report. We know that this industry is a fun and profitable industry. We know you can really achieve your goals here, but we know even more that you should be fully informed. You shouldn't have to settle for the "half-truths" (lies) told to you by the salesmen of these types of business opportunities.

Truthfully, our report was intended only to give you a very brief overview of things that are valid for you to consider. Industry experts wrote the following reports below, and you should read them before making your buying decision.

So, did you know that there are over 17 different causes of poor ink adhesion? For printing on plastic the troubleshooting list includes things like plasticizer-level in the part, dyne-level of the part, level of mold release used by the molder? See? There is a lot for you to know. Did you think that you could become a great printer overnight? Do you think your customers will tolerate even small mistakes? Would you tolerate small mistakes on printed products you ordered?

To get fully informed read these articles by the equipment manufacturers:

Understanding and Using Pad Printing Inks
http://www.padprintmachinery.com/ Articles_UnderstandingInks.cfm

Choosing a Pad Printing Press
http://www.screenweb.com/index.php/channel/8/id/1610/

The Secrets of Successful Pad Printing
http://www.screenweb.com/index.php/channel/8/id/1611/

Many technical articles on screen-printing
http://www.screenweb.com http://www.screenprinters.net

The 3 Most Common Screen Printing Mistakes
http://www.screenprinters.net/articles/index.php?art=123

Critical Factors in Screen Printing
http:// www.screenprinters.net/articles/index.php?art=122

For More Information Contact:

Joe McVoy
Profitable Marketing Systems, LLC
1100 Nautilus Court
Lafayette, CO 80026
Web: www.ProfitableMarketingSystems.com
Email: Joe@ProfitableMarketingSystems.com
Phone: (720) 890-8760
Fax: (303) 604-6839

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© 2006 Profitable Marketing Systems, LLC