Are you thinking about starting or expanding your custom apparel business with direct-to-garment printing? Check out this episode of Apparel Academy, where Henry shows you the right way to price a DTG order. Pricing your orders correctly is vital to ensure your business’s success and increase your profit potential.



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*The RICOH DTG printer is no longer available.

When pricing orders, some people prefer to use a fixed price list rather than price per job because it’s easier to do. However, a price list may not take into account the time it takes to set up an order and its complexity, which means you could miss out on gaining more profit. That is why you need to create a pricing structure that takes into account the time, labor, and materials that go into printing each item. Doing so will allow you to calculate how much to charge per item to reach your desired Return on Investment (ROI) or Profit Per Hour (PPH). Also, keep in mind that labor also includes applying pretreat and curing the garment with a heat press.



Let’s take a look at a helpful formula that will help you price your print jobs accurately. First, determine how much you would like to profit per hour. For example, let’s say $75. You can adjust this number based on your business’ cost structure. Next, figure out how many shirts you can print per hour. This will vary depending on the size of the design, complexity, and how efficient you are. Let’s say you’re printing a standard 10” x 10" design on a light-colored t-shirt. Note that dark colored shirts may take double the time as it requires a white layer to be printed first for the colors to show. A breakdown of the time it would take to print on the shirt is, one minute to pretreat, three minutes to print (including loading the shirt and sending to print), and a minute to cure the ink with a heat press. This comes out to a total of five minutes for the entire process. That means you can do 12 light-colored shirts in 1 hour.



Now divide your goal profit per hour, which is $75, by the number of shirts you can print per hour, which is 12, to get your profit per item. In this example, your profit per item is $6.25. So, you need to make $6.25 of profit per item at the speed you’re printing to reach your target profit per hour of $75. The last step is to add the cost of all the materials to your profit per item. For DTG printing, the cost of materials is around $3 for a blank garment, $2 of ink per print, and $0.50 of pretreat per shirt, totaling to $5.50.



If you want to profit $6.25 per shirt, add your material cost of $5.50 to get a sale price of $11.75 per shirt. You can also add surcharges or set up fees to increase the value of the order. However, most DTG prints can easily be sold for at least $20, which means you can make even more money than you initially estimated.



By the way, even though ink cost per print is difficult to estimate, many DTG printers, like the RICOH Ri 1000, come with a helpful calculator that can tell you the cost of printing a design. It can even provide a breakdown of the ink used for each color in a particular print job, which is an excellent way to know if you have enough ink to complete bigger jobs.



All in all, the key takeaways are to determine your ideal profit per hour, see how many shirts you can print per hour, and then calculate your price per garment. Doing these calculations will help maximize your profit potential and keep you from underpricing your services. As a result, you’ll have great profits and be able to scale your business.