Is Digital For Me?

A look at why, with all its advantages, so many people fail to make money with their digital printer. Digital printing has many advantages, but it’s not for everyone. Like any decorating process, making it successful requires hard work and effort.

 There are a lot of reasons why every decorator should investigate the possibility of adding digital direct-to-garment equipment to their shop. A primary reason, and the biggest one that prompted me, was it broadens the possibilities of the types of orders you can take in. As a screen printer, my company was limited to customers who had vector files from which we could produce color seperations. We couldn’t print .jpgs, .gifs or a number of other offbeat lower quality files. I once had a week where I turned down 25 screen printing jobs, because the artwork was not ready to be separated.

Within the past five to seven years, people have started trying to design their own artwork. Since the average non-artist doesn’t have Adobe Illustrator, CorelDraw or PhotoShop, we are seeing a wide spectrum of file formats that can’t be used for screen printing, but can be converted for digital. So digital is opening up a whole new customer base and allowing decorators to take advantage of more opportunities to generate revenue.

However, digital is not for everyone and unfortunately, too many decorators have made the investment without seeing any return.

I see a lot of decorators who have attempted to get into the digital marketplace based on what they’ve heard: That it’s an easy pathway to money. But the reality is if you don’t have a customer base for digital printing, you have to go out and create one. You are not going to get customers out of the blue.

It’s Not A Cash Cow
There’s a big misconception out there that all you need to do is buy a digital printer, and you will be able to generate enough revenue to support the equipment, a shop, and make a living.

The catch here is if you want to make a living from it, you have to have enough equipment. One desktop printer isn’t going to do it. While you may hear stories of how the big guys are selling shirts from websites for $20 a piece, what you may not realize is these companies have a lot of machines. They’re also investing a significant amount of capital into driving traffic to their Web sites.

Another issue that many people don’t realize is this technology cannot be used to decorate every type of garment like you do with screen printing. So if all you are offering is digital printing, you have a very limited selection of garments to offer.

The most effective garments are 100% cotton, and at my shop we don’t print anything else. We have the capabilities us to print other materials, but from a production standpoint, cotton is the least amount of hassle so we stick with it. Digital printing is not unlike screen printing in that when you print composite fabrics like 50/50s, you have a lot of dye migration, bleeding, and all of those same issues. I believe that the technology will advance and these issues will be solved.

In order to be profitable, we have to keep product moving out of the shop. We have done so much R&D that we know what works and what doesn’t and we are not about to struggle with things that we know don’t work. You can’t please everyone all of the time. Learning how to sell the process to your customer is just as important as a good print. Don’t set unrealistic expectations or bite off more than the technology is designed handle.

Getting Good Results
Another reason why people fail is they give up too early or they’re not being willing to put in the time and effort necessary to figure out how to make it work. Direct-to-garment printing seems to attract a lot of people with no T-shirt printing experience. I maintain that if you are a good screen printer or embroiderer, you will probably be a good digital printer, because you have what it takes to get the end result.

So many people right now have a plug-and play mentality of digital tee shirt printing. They have no art background, and they don’t know how to compensate technically in artwork and print prep areas for issues that come up in this medium, and there are a lot of them.

I had a business that came to see me for advice after they bought an expensive direct-to-garment machine. This company screen prints around 10,000 shirts per shift. It invested the money, but was not willing to invest the time and effort to get it to work. So now the printer is sitting in a corner.

When we started doing digital printing, particularly on darks which is a specialty with us, we put in months of R&D. We took the knowledge we got from the equipment manufacturer and we added our own twist to it by using our screen printing knowledge.

Part of being a success in this business is finding your own way. It’s taking the time to learn how to make the technology work in your shop. It involves figuring out the physical environment and having an A to Z understanding of artwork, equipment, pretreatments, inks, and chemistry. It’s a very complicated process to make this happen correctly.

Developing A Customer Base
One of the reasons that there has been such an explosion in digital printing is that people believe that they can make a living from the Internet. There are only a handful of companies that have successfully figured out the search engine optimization (SEO) tricks to get enough traffic to create a continuous order flow.

SEO is something that we have worked really hard at. We have spent years developing our website and its capabilities. We have found digital printing is primarily driven by the Internet, and it’s driven by nothing else. Digital printing for walk-in customers or being sold from a kiosk is great, but you are not going to make a living at it if that’s all you do.

Back in 2007, one of the first things I did before I owned any equipment was I surveyed my customers. I wanted to find out whether or not they even knew what digital printing was, and they didn’t.

However, today the average consumer who shops for T-shirts and has looked around on the web knows what digital printing is. Even though they don’t understand it technically or how it’s different than screen printing they have heard the terminology “digital print” or “DTG”. And because digital printing has become part of the lexicon, it makes all of our efforts at marketing a little bit easier.

That being said, some people have done a poor job of marketing in that they have overstated the capabilities of the digital printing, and this has lead to a lot of customer disappointment. We have people who send us samples from print jobs by other printers. We look at the work and cannot believe how bad some of these shirts are. This is a result of decorators who have not taken the time to learn the medium not the equipment.

It is sold as a push-button technology in certain segments of the market, and people are not getting educated about the true cost of operating the equipment. Potential customers are not being told the full story.

I see a lot of failure that is simply due to frustration.  There are a lot of folks out there who are walking away from their investment. You also can see this in the volume of the used equipment for sale. They’re fed up and can’t make it work for all of the reasons listed above, but that is not the fault of the medium.

Digital printing has been a very successful venture for my company. Although I started my company as a screen printer, I have slowly shifted work over to digital to the point where I now do more digital dollar volume than screen printing.

My advice is to go into digital printing with your eyes wide open. Talk to other equipment owners about their experiences getting started printing custom tee shirts. Plan on spending sufficient time and effort to truly learn the process and ensure you can put out quality prints. To learn the ins and outs and become proficient will take about six months. Invest in at least a case of shirts and plan on using them to practice on.

Once you become proficient at printing, you will find that you’ll be able to capture business that you were previously turning away. You also will be able to develop new markets that will profitably add to your bottom line.

Digital Printing Rules For Success

1 - You need artwork expertise. If you don’t have it, plan on paying for it.

2 - Ideally, you need decorating experience. Whether it’s screen printing or embroidery, it ensures you already have gone through the trial-and error process of learning a decorating technique. DTG will be no different.

3 - Have an established customer base. If you are just starting out, you may want to consider contracting orders until you have enough customers to buy your own equipment.

3 - If you don’t already have a Website or you have one that you don’t do much with, plan on investing in SEO activities.

4 - Plan on investing R&D time to learn the equipment and its capabilities. Also plan on investing some money in blank shirts to practice on.

10/14/2011
Little Falls, New Jersey 07424