How To Maximize Digital Direct To Garment Production On Custom T-Shirts (Part 2)
By Kevin Kelly

Operators
When it comes down to it, your custom t-shirt business is only as good as your employees. For every job we run, our machine operators know when they can and when they can't push their machine to a high speed. We've also trained our operators to start printing with the highest volume and work down to the lowest volume.

In production, organization is key and produces an efficient workspace. We remind our operators to keep their tables clean, set aside their coffee, keep their paperwork accessible, put tools back where they found them, etc. Our office and warehouse staff understands that attention to detail is critical to the operator’s success and this all makes for satisfied customers.

We also train our operators on our basic tee shirt curing principle for the gas ovens: 7 minutes for dark goods and 4.5 minutes for whites. Only about 10% of what we print is straight white custom tee shirts, so to be efficient, we often set aside one day to print all the white orders and knock out considerable volume in one shot.

We're also lucky in that all of our operators are artists on the side, so they have a working knowledge of Photoshop and how the processes are ripped. Good file prep is critical to maximizing efficiency in your shop. But if an issue arises, our operators can walk into the art room and correct files without having to ask.

Hiring artists as operators started by accident, but has worked out great for both sides. Our operators can sample their own art, and often, they develop unique placement ideas and concepts that we may never have thought of from the business end.

Our operators also load, unload, fold and box the product. Then, they pass along the goods to our shipping employee, who checks the product against the order and counts the items. Unlike in screen printing, we don't need a loader/unloader dryer person, so we save on salary costs.

Managing Orders
Nowadays, many businesses rely not only upon walk-in customers, but on Internet orders, as well. For us, Internet orders can be a bottleneck for many tee shirts shops. Many online orders for custom t-shirts are for less than 12 shirts. We can receive hundreds of them each week and managing that portion of the business takes some real coordination. These small orders take a lot of man hours of pulling and separating goods. We're always looking at ways to be more efficient, but no matter how you cut it, if you have to separate out 350 shirts to print 75 orders, it takes time.

After a customer places an online custom t-shirt order, we download and prep the art. One of the most important aspects in creating a successful order flow in online decorating is your art room. My art director, Matt Fox and I have developed systems to handle volumes of art. We have developed a series of custom rips to aid in this process. It does get crazy with the volume we do especially when Matt is involved in working on custom art design projects.

Once the orders are prepped in the art area, they are tagged as complete in that department, and the paperwork flows out to the warehouse. Then, the warehouse staff puts the goods in a bin, which is placed on a rolling rack.

The operators follow a schedule that indicates how many of the racked orders they have to complete in a certain time period. We batch large orders together, and break down small orders and schedule them back to back. This makes it more efficient, and we can satisfy many customers in a short period of time doing the smaller runs.

You can't always satisfy everyone at the same time. You have to prioritize your orders in the best interest of your business. We use custom database software to help manage our inventory orders and priority requirements.

Every shop is different and there is no one magic formula that is going to work for everyone. Achieving peak efficiency has been a trial and error process at my shop, and I continue to look for ways to improve. Hopefully some of the procedures I am using will make sense for your shop or at least be a good starting point as you work on evolving your own techniques to maximizing your shop’s productivity.

Blue Heron is the nations most well regarded authority for direct-to-garment printing on black t-shirts. Kevin Kelly can be reached at 800-709-2380.

06/23/2011
Little Falls, New Jersey 07424