I’m willing to front the costs for an initial batch of 12 to 24 shirts. I create my own designs and get them printed locally from a great independent shop in NJ. Top quality stuff, vibrant inks, etc.
The cost basically breaks down like this, for Gildan shirts (better than Hanes and Fruit of Loom, not as trendy and slightly bigger style than American Apparel)
Screen: $25 per side (front or back). So, $50 for front AND back. That’s standard.
Color prices:
12-24 shirts 1 ink color: $5.75 per shirt
2 or more colors, up to 4 colors, add about $0.75 per additional color.
The more the quantity of shirts, the lesser the price. 100 shirts about $4.25 a pop. May not seem like a savings, but do the math, it is. 😉
Then there is artwork cost. That’s basically taking the vector artwork (which is the best way to approach the design, you can use bitmaps, but you’ll want to convert or trace the bitmaps into vector) from a program like Illustrator and converting it (don’t know how this works myself actually) so that it gets printed correctly by the screen and printer machine.
The thing with the 1 to 4 colors is that you don’t use gradients, usually, anything over a 4 color process is a lot of money. Then you’re talking about selling a $25 tshirt. LIttle extreme i think.
You can do a LOT with 1 to 4 colors. The less colors, the less cost to get them made, the less time seperating the colors to get the screens to print certain colors (ink is basically projected onto certain parts of screen so that only that part of the design is printed in that color). Or i think it’s 1 screen per color. I forget offhand.
So let’s say we do 3 colors front and back for an initial 24 pieces, 6 medium, 6 large, 6 xl and 6 2x sizes. Do the math and we’re looking at $250 to $300. That’s cost. Of course, you sell the shirts at retail, for sake of argument, for around the $15 to $17 dollar range. Add $1 for XL and larger. Do the math again, $17 times 24 shirts equals close to $400 bucks income apprimatation. Not a lot of income at first, but the next time you get shirts made, you’re not paying for the screens, so you knock of cost of screens, and you’re done paying for artwork too. So basically the next time around, if you see a demand, you get more shirts made, since the more quantity of shirts you get made, the lest the price per shirt.
Seems kinda silly for 1 person to front the money. So here’s my idea:
We setup a gallery for people to submit their own designs. Just let the WP community, or ANYONE for that matter, come up with a design. Then the winner gets $100. Let it run for a couple months. Then let the community vote on the best design. Then the WP staff has final say, like judges. Then bingo! We got our design.
Or, skip the whole input from the community and a few of us, or the WP staff, does their own thing. But the community is the way to go since, WP is after all, a community driven project.
Besides, it will create buzz. There’s a LOT of talented artists out there. And you may end up seeing a celebrity wearing a WP shirt on TV or who knows what, in the paper, etc.
Finally, the other point with screenprinting is choice of colored shirts. Black, brown, red, whatever. I can create a template for people to use, like an outline of a shirt in different colors, so that they have a “canvass” on which to draw to get an idea of how the tshirt should look like.
That’s my idea. That’s tshirt printing in a nutshell. Anyone can do it. All you need is a vector program (just do a search for open source if you can’t afford illustrator) and an idea and design.
