Right after “How much money can I make?” DTG Printing prices they can charge is the next question a custom t-shirt shop start-up asks.
“How do I price DTG printed t-shirts?”
The answer is $15. And $19.99. And it’s $25.00 and up.
Typically depending on the following criteria:
- Your Niche or Local Market [what the market will bear]
- The quality and cost of the wholesale t-shirts or other garments
- Quantity of the order
- Wholesale or Retail?
Let’s go through those and a few more options, and how they might affect your DTG printing prices.
DTG Printing vs Screen Printing and the Prices
It used to be that EVERY custom t-shirt job got compared with screen printing or silk-screened shirts. And that almost all the buyers of direct to garment printers (DTG) were screen printers expanding into digital.
So pricing your custom t-shirts depends mostly on how many colors there are in the design and what quantity you ordered.
But that was because every time you added a color into a custom t-shirt design, you added time and complexity to setting up the job.
A single-color text print could be done by just making a single screen. 2 colors were twice as hard. 4 colors 4x as difficult, etc.
And the more colorful/complex the design, the bigger a screen-printing press you might need to make it in the first place.
That’s why so many mass-produced shirts just have 1 color/tone graphic!
Since a lot of work goes into the setup of a screen-printing job, those printers usually charge a big setup fee or only accept larger jobs. And they spend a lot of time talking customers out of multi-color.
Once the job is set up, though, it’s very cheap to print those shirts. So if someone wants 5 shirts – screen printing is a poor choice. But if they want 1,000 shirts? It makes more sense because you can buy them for less.
As a DTG Printing custom t-shirt business, you don’t have any of those issues. You can be just as profitable on ONE shirt as you can on 50, or 100, or 1,000 shirts.
One way to price your products is by examining the “market price” for them. This just means you compare your prices with what others are selling for in your area or market.
To develop a market price structure, one of the biggest factors in DTG Printing prices is who or where you’re selling to.
Market Pricing
It’s pretty obvious how, if you’re a locally focused business, where you are can affect prices.
If you live in Manhattan, you’re probably going to pay more for EVERYTHING than if you live in Tampa, Florida or Boise, Idaho.
So a custom t-shirt in one city might always sell for $25-$50 or more, while in a smaller town they might sell for less.
A good way to judge market pricing is to call potential competitors in your area and price out a small job. Plus doing the same online, or in the nearest market that’s a similar size.
Niche Pricing
The same goes for your Niche or Target Market.
A resort-wear clothing line customized with Hotel names will get a premium.
Focusing on shirts for custom car clubs might earn you more than similar shirts for a kid’s summer camp.
Uniform tees for a landscaping business might not get quite as much as custom tees for Mother’s Day gifts.
Cost or bottom-up pricing is a widespread approach. It’s the one that screen-printers have traditionally used.
In Cost Pricing, you will “keystone” the cost of your wholesale blank t-shirt.
And that’s where the Quality of the garment impacts your prices.