WHAT DO YOU NEED TO STARTUP A DTG BUSINESS?
GOOD QUESTION! Well here's the basics that you'll need.
4. Inks, papers, heat press covers
5. Computer
6. Rack for organizing garments
7. Hangers for garments
8. Adequate space to produce, roughly 500 sq ft.
Another question you need to ask yourself is HOW SERIOUS AM I? If you want to print 200 or more shirts a day you need another printer and heat press because you have to have 2 presses in order to be efficient and pretreat and press garments then put them into production while they finished garments can be cured.
How Can I Reach ROI With DTG?
ROI SPREADSHEET
It all depends on which approach you are taking. Fulfilment, your own clothing, custom jobs or maybe all?
With custom jobs you need to be a be able to charge a good price to cover all your expenses.
If your equipment costs $15,000 and you are printing as little as 20 shirts a day for 30 days a month and charging a minimum of $25 per shirt at the minimum that is $15,000... a little under half the amount of your equipment. It would take you a about 3 months to reach your ROI. The better the process the more efficient you will be and the more money you will make. BOTTOM LINE. Invest in a computer and custom designer software for your site so your customers can create their own designs on and so you don't have to waste 3 hours changing fonts just because they don't like the way it looks! They design, they checkout, they pay and you print! That's how it should be. This software is about $4,000 to start so your initial investment would be about $19,000 if you go that route.
If you are making your own clothing line the fastest way to reach ROI with a DTG printer is to have print ready files and designs ready in print ready format so that when you do launch your clothing line you are not trying to learn the process while doing all this work and marketing and trying to juggle it all. Once you get this done you need to learn the craft. Buy from someone that can train you well and is experienced and have your marketing material done before you launch so that you can focus on the print process and push sales to stores or boutiques that fit your niche. If you wholesale out your designs it can be like fulfilment volumes below, if you push it correctly. Be professional, use hang tags and custom neck labels to make people aware that you mean business if you want to be taken seriously.
You need to push volume orders if doing fulfilment or printing more than 200 shirts a day you need 2 or more printers.
If you are doing fulfilment and want to print a maximum of 300 shirts a day on 2 printers. Most fulfilment places get paid an average of $4 on light shirts and $5 on darks.
Lets say you printed 150 light shirts and 150 darks
150 light shirts X $4=$600
150 dark garments X $5=750
Total amount in cash in hand for that day = $1350
Ink Costs for light garments (average per shirt) $0.20 X 150=$30
Ink Costs for Dark garments (average per shirt) $2.00 X 150= $300
Pretreat expense for 150 shirts (darks)=$70
$15 per hour and 2 employees at 8 hours= $240
Cash in Hand=$1350
Expenses =$640
Profit = $710
If you did this for 30 days in a month.... $710 X 30= $21,300
With 2 printers and all the necessary equipment your cost would be roughly $25,000 so it would be about under 2 months to reach ROI.
Your costs would actually be lower than this because at this volume ink and pretreat costs would be cheaper with how much volume you would be producing.
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