The Complete Guide to Choosing a T-Shirt Screen Printing Service
Finding the right screening printing firm for your t-shirts requires knowing your options. Here is a guide to choosing a t-shirt screen printing service.
The approximately 33.2 million American small businesses face a tremendous amount of competition. Some of it comes from massive big box retailers. The rest comes from other small businesses and e-commerce options.
In the face of that competition, small businesses must look for ways to stand out in the marketplace. This often means leaning into online marketing, but some businesses look for offline options, like screen printing custom t-shirts.
Going that route requires a way of choosing a t-shirt screen printing service. If you're considering custom shirts for your business, keep reading for our guide to screen printing and choosing a screen printing service.
What Is Screen Printing?
In this context, screen printing is a process that lets you put your own design on a t-shirt or other textile material. It's a simple enough process, in principle, that you can do it in your own home or garage with the right setup. Although, commercial-grade screen printing is usually impractical for home screen printers due to the volumes.
How Does Screen Printing Work?
While professional screen printing works a little differently, it's helpful if you understand the basic process. Screen printing begins with making a stencil.
In reality, almost anything impermeable will work for a stencil, but liquid-resistant materials like acetate are fairly common. You trace the image onto the stencil material and cut the shape out.
The stencil then goes onto a piece of fabric. You use fabric printing ink and roll it over the stencil. The roller presses the ink into the fabric, but only where the stencil lets it through.
Then, you let the ink dry based on the ink instructions.
For more complex or multi-color designs, it becomes a multi-step process using different stencils and inks for different parts of the design.
Most screen printing services use a variety of machinery to speed up the process.
Benefits of Screen Printing
Screen printing offers a few essential benefits for small businesses. Screen printed t-shirts are physical objects that people handle. That sense memory of touching the shirt helps solidify a connection between their brain and your business.
If you use a custom image, you can also play on people's interest in the new and different. New and different things are memorable.
With the screen printing essentials and benefits covered, let's look at choosing a service.
Location
One of the first things that you'll want to consider is the location of your screenprinting service. While you can find plenty of similar services online, many of them operate in other states or even across the country.
That means waiting around after they finish processing your order until they ship it. Plus, you always run the risk of the shipment going astray or getting delayed. Given the expectation that supply issues will continue for some time, that's a real possibility.
If you're ordering way in advance, delays are less of a problem. If you're on a tight schedule, though, you definitely want a local service. With a local service, you can drive over and pick up your order as soon as its ready.
Reviews
You will, of course, want a service that gets good reviews. Just make sure you look at reviews given the service by other businesses and not rank-and-file consumers. Fulfilling a 50-shirt order for a family gathering is different than fulfilling a 500-shirt order from another business.
Reading reviews online is usually the most convenient option for seeing how a business does at this. Make a mental note not to fixate on one or two bad reviews. Instead, look at the overall pattern of reviews.
Pricing
When choosing your service, you should spend a bit of time comparing screen printing costs. Most screen printing services will put up a fee schedule or even let you input order specifics to get an estimate for your order.
You should look at anywhere from three to five services to do your price comparisons. Ideally, most of the services will charge similar prices for the same order.
If your estimate is way above or way below the average, remain cautious. Very high pricing can indicate that the company primarily works with bigger companies that enjoy bigger marketing budgets. While that's not necessarily a problem, it can mean that they won't prioritize your order.
If the estimate comes in way below the average, it can signal that the company needs money badly or uses non-standard t-shirts to complete their orders. Again, this isn't necessarily a problem, but it could turn into one.
Quality
Another thing you want to check on is the t-shirt quality. Many services will default to the least expensive shirt for every order, which can leave you handing out very flimsy shirts that won't hold up.
Minimally, you want a service that offers you options for the kind of shirts you want to use. If you can handle sample shirts in advance of the order, that will help you make a more informed choice for your order.
Order Fulfillment Times
You should also ask them about their order fulfillment times. The importance of this will vary based on your own schedule.
If you only want the shirts sometime in the next three to six months, almost any service will do. If you want them in the next two weeks, those order fulfillment times matter a lot.
Minimum Orders
You should also be aware that some screen printing services only take orders that meet minimum quantities. Again, most services will note or specify these minimum order numbers on their websites or order forms. If they don't, make sure that you ask about it.
Choosing a T-Shirt Screen Printing Service
Choosing a t-shirt screen printing service doesn't diverge much from choosing other kinds of services. There are just a few specific areas that you want to watch out for.
Make sure you find out about their average order fulfillment times and minimum order numbers. Those two factors can knock a lot of potential services out of contention and simplify your selection process.
Dynamic Designs offers t-shirt screen printing services in the Jacksonville, FL area. For more information, contact Dynamic Designs today.
