Episode 172 - 2 Cheapest Ways to Start a T shirt Business Sublimation vs Vinyl

Episode 172 - 2 Cheapest Ways to Start a T shirt Business Sublimation vs Vinyl

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hey everyone and welcome to episode 172 on yet another episode of the custom apparel startups podcast this is mark stevenson and this is mark vela and today we're here to talk about the two cheapest ways to start a t-shirt business sublimation versus vinyl you know i think though that we need to go back and listen to whatever the last podcast that we did about preparation okay because uh we were talking for about 10 minutes before i realized i never touched the record button which is why i started with take two but i like this topic too um cheap ways to make custom t-shirts always a hot topic especially when you're you know when you're talking about making actually professional quality you know um it could have been better phrased maybe um inexpensive ways to get into the custom t-shirt business producing high quality goods for your customers yeah i like that better but you wouldn't have clicked on it probably no yeah yeah cheap definitely got you guys attention uh well on the second time i decided to make the sublimation versus vinyl more dramatic okay yeah if you noticed i didn't know if you noticed i didn't i didn't notice that i was already thinking what i was gonna say i really don't hear much of what you say but anyway um so this is a great topic not only because you know i mean if you're if you're listening to the custom apparel starburst podcast that's probably on your to-do list is to get into the custom apparel business or customization of some kind and you know we talk a lot about white toner printing and we talk about direct-to-garment and embroidery and business in general but we realize that a lot of our potential customers at coldeste and coleman company are starting on a really small budget and and that's okay so we wanted to feature a couple of things that could get you going right off the bat for very little money compare the two and then see how they stack up against each other and maybe your expectations yeah i think it's great and and this actually comes right after an episode about um how kind of a guaranteed success plan for when you're starting on a really small budget too so this this podcast podcast episode goes great along with that so if you're listening to this episode about starting a t-shirt business in a cheap way if you go back one episode to 171 um we talk about kind of how you can guarantee yourself some success and uh and so in this episode we're going to talk about um first of all are these methods good for you which would be heat transfer vinyl and sublimation for making custom t-shirts and more you know it's about the t-shirt business but it's about a ton of other things too so we'll get into those um which we're going to talk about which one's better which by the way that's oh you know it's a trick question because you know with all the equipment you sell there's no better you know there's there's what's better for you uh we'll talk about which one's cheaper all that stuff there's a lot of great information and we can kind of uh go through a ton of it but mark uh why don't we go ahead and start with um how do we know if either of these is right for you or for the list for those of you listening out there how do we know if if heat transfer vinyl or vinyl cutting or sublimation is right for you well i mean first of all we're going from the perspective that you want to get into the custom t-shirt business i would say while both of these tools are great at customization of other things i'm you know really we're kind of focused in on custom tees as being the most common application for our customers and really the um the clearest and easiest roi or return on investment for each one of these purchases to figure out so we want to make sure that you want to customize t t's that you that you want to be able to operate on a uh in a small footprint like you're not gonna rent a warehouse you know otherwise you might you might make a different choice uh you um you also want to be able to do it in a home environment you know i think that the next couple of points you know you don't have to worry about you know some equipment you have to vent you know some equipment you know you might have barrels of ink that require a lot of space some equipment you might need different you might have different space requirements both of these pieces of equipment you can really comfortably use on your dining room table on your office desk a back room they're very flexible for t-shirt startups to be able to do almost anywhere yeah like appliance it's like any appliance you would buy you know any appliance you buy you can for the most part you know you can feel comfortable just plugging in the wall and it'll work in your house right exactly right outside of a couple exceptions i think yeah so the um the the other things are you want to make sure that it's uh pretty easy to learn and you know there's uh there's complexities to any of these things you're going to have to learn something none of this equipment is magic right you've got to get a design for both you've got to send them to the to the output device you know there are things that you have to learn and learn how to do but these are relatively easy um you want something that will do more than just t-shirts maybe or do different kinds of things on a t-shirt and um you know naturally it's got to be cheap you know it's got to be a small budget compared to most of the other ways to make sure it's on the market yeah all those are great points so if you've kind of listened to that list and all that stuff checks off for you then these are one of these two is a perfect system for you now um are there uh better you know quote unquote better ways to make a t-shirt you know um one could debatably say i mean it's hard right this word better is hard but are there ways you could produce more t-shirts faster yes are there ways that are that you can produce thousands of t-shirts in in minutes or hours you know yes uh you know are there ways you can customize things you know in a very very unique way yeah but that that's not what this is about this is kind of those six or seven items that you mentioned this is that's your checklist if if this is your checklist then you're here um if you're looking to do something bigger better greater faster stronger than this then go back to the podcast homepage and look for episodes about other equipment we have and kind of listen to them all because there's a ton to listen yeah we actually did a two uh two-part series kind of on how much does it cost so where we compared all the different uh t-shirt printing and customization methods gave you know gave a price range on each and kind of an overview on what they did so maybe that's good for you but i will tell you one more thing about this kind of choice between sublimation and heat transfer vinyl which if you will get to it but you know it's basically like a professional version of having a cricut right for for making t-shirts is it neither one of the these things will do everything that you want it to do that you could possibly want it to do every technology has its own set of limitations that's built in you know um and corresponding advantages and we'll go through what they are for these two pieces of equipment but just just so you know you could spend 25 000 on a direct to garment printer and it would not do a great job printing on dark polyester you could spend um fifty thousand dollars on a uv printer and not be able to do fabric or thirty thousand dollars on a high volume direct to film printer and not be able to apply anything to hard goods you know so all of these different technologies come with their pros and cons and we'll get into those for these but just so you know it does both of these do check those boxes like mark said you know you want to customize t-shirts you want to go through all those bullet points you know these definitely fit into that you just might have to make a few trade-offs as we go along yeah the way i um look at these two pieces of equipment and i'm gonna make some uh uh cooking references throughout this podcast for one because nice mug by the way if you're watching the video thank you mark is about to smash a mug with a hammer oh my gosh he missed again um so um i'm gonna make some cooking references because i do love to cook and a lot of this stuff i find just lines up perfectly with a lot of cooking stuff right and folks um if you are going to move into your first apartment right which might be like starting your your brand new small business and you didn't have a ton of money which you probably didn't if you moved into your first apartment you figure what's going to be the first cooking thing i'm going to get and it's probably not a 500 dutch oven you know from la crescent you know that's probably not what you're buying you're probably buying a non-stick pan right you know um you're probably buying a cast iron skillet you know but you're gonna say oh but i can't bake cupcakes in either of those two things no right you know uh so so the neck you know later on you might get a cupcake pan but a cupcake pan is not gonna be your first buy right right it's just not versatile enough all right but you're going to run into it because somebody's going to want you to make them cupcakes somebody's going to make cupcakes right so i think that this is kind of what what's your first pan and then there's the debate you know somebody will say well get a cast iron skillet someone else will say i think you should get um a uh a non-stick you know teflon type and then there's the debate and and that's what this conversation is this conversation is about the debate of the two that are the number one starters out there for somebody looking to kind of get into their first thing so i think we'll go right into the first one and uh we're gonna talk about sublimation first no particular order it's just uh how we wrote the notes yeah there you go so i mean the first thing i want to get out of the way is sublimation is really sciencey yeah you know what i mean like there's a lot there's a lot that happens like like uh technically it's called sublimation because the ink bonds to the shirt right like it it there's a process it sublimates the design into the shirt so that's why printing is called sublimation i don't know what i why i started with that but i just wanted to say the word sciency yeah well sub sublimation is a is a um i'm correcting me or don't correct me because you can't because it's a podcast but i think it's like a chemistry type of a turn it's what happens when normally normally what happens is matter moves through states right and it moves from uh liquid to solid to solid to gas or or i'm sorry solid to liquid to gas and vice versa so those are the normal states of matter transformation like water right um sublimation is kind of one of those uh scenarios where it skips that liquid state and it moves from directly from being a solid to being a gas and that's what's happening here on the science level of it is you've got a piece of paper with something printed on it a solid it's dry and then you apply heat to it it turns into a gas immediately and that gas kind of gets sucked into whatever you're decorating that's the sciency kind of part of it yeah and i mean the end result is um you have something that can almost literally never wash off it can't because you've basically died back in the olden times they actually called it dye sublimation right because you're because it basically dies that dies the material so but the process is just like any other transfer printer right you take a graphic on your computer you print it out to a sublimation printer on a piece of sublimation paper and you take that piece of paper and you put it in on top of a shirt in a heat press you hit the press down and presto you have now created a custom t-shirt yeah i mean it's pretty it's pretty it's about as simple as it is you print on a piece of paper and you apply heat to it and that goes on a t-shirt also on a hat or a mug or a mouse pad or a keychain or a towel or a hundred other things right um so essentially it's print apply heat give it to your customer profit right i mean that's that's that's about what the process is so it's a nice simple process to do it's sciencey but you don't even really have to understand just just to know that i'm printing on something and now i'm gonna i'm gonna uh put it under a heat press and then i'll have a finished good that i can sell um so speaking of selling what does it cost to buy something like this what are we cheap it's it's cheap as a matter of fact mark villa it's one of the two cheapest things that you can do to make your custom t-shirt that is that yeah it's it's true it's in the title somewhere oh um so uh basically it's uh for the printer itself it's like 600 bucks i mean at the time of this um podcast because prices change over time so we always want to qualify that right now you can get the is it the sawgrass sg500 the sawgrass sg500 and i think right now it's about 625 to be a little more exact at the time of this right um uh this by the way for those in the future listening i do this every once in a while this is the year 2022 when prices of everything in the world change uh from when you went to sleep to when you woke up yes so uh so uh we just have to to say that you know just because we don't know if that if this is going to be a 700 printer next month or or 500 printer right prices are changing a lot but this i would uh safely assume around 600 bucks is probably going to be a good starting point for the printer and you can finance it okay which is crazy to me which is crazy um you can finance it um there's some minimum requirements for financing and all that stuff but you can finance some something like this for under 100 bucks under 50 bucks a month sometimes depending on what you choose and qualifications and stuff yeah i like that and you know just like with the next one that we're going to talk about you know you need you need the printer itself you need sublimation paper and you need sublimation inks you know so there's usually a little bit of a bundle that happens in there you know you want to add at least a box paper and you want to add at least you know your starter ring set might be great but you might want to pick up an extra set you know just got to be a little flexible there yeah i mean it's basically the price of netflix isn't that about 50 bucks a month now are they i i you know what i i really i'm not going to say that out loud because i don't have to look and i might have to it's getting up there um so there's also that that's the starting one the next step up which isn't that much more the sg 1000 by sawgrass which um so we're we're not sponsored by sawgrass we are spawning do you sell the printers yeah but we're sponsored by cole desi and you can check out coldeste.com but this is a printer that called essie sells and coledessie is very particular about the brands and styles of printers that we sell they have to be good they have to be quality we don't want to support anything that's gonna break every two seconds because we're not in we're not looking to um constantly fix broken printers we're looking to uh help get you a printer and then help you be successful with it yep i agree but the sg-1000 is the next step up it's bigger bigger prints obviously has benefits you can imagine um also a faster production because if you're doing little three-inch mug logos you can print you know two three times as many on a bigger sheet of paper so so it's the sg 600 prints on like a standard piece of paper size eight and a half by 11. and what does the 1000 do you could do you could do up to 13 by 19. okay with a little add-on attachment that they have um so you could do eight and a half by eleven you could do 11 by 17 or 13 by 19. which if you uh if you measure out 13 by 19 and kind of draw it out and hold it up to your chest you'll see that's the way to do a huge huge print for a t-shirt even even the biggest guy in the football team will be happy with 13 by 19 size print yeah so so i i think that's kind of uh i mean that's an early decision point because you know uh from my perspective both of those things are cheap right the six hundred dollars is ridiculous and the fifteen hundred dollars is still a very inexpensive way to produce the quality result that these printers do yeah so yeah and this is the hard part and there's a conversation we have a lot that you know cheap expensive are such a relative terms relative terms right so somebody somebody would look at a um a tesla and say that it's a pretty cheap car because they own half million dollar vehicles yeah right um and on the flip side um if the most expensive car somebody's ever owned is worth three thousand dollars a tesla seems crazy and we we have that conversation on online and facebook and instagram tick tock all the time you know where we we try to remember to publish the pricing for everything that we advertise you know in cold essie and half the people will say wow that's way too expensive and half the people will say well that's a real it sounds like a really good deal for what it does yeah well here's how i what i think about what what i think really when it comes to cheap and expensive is how how um how achievable is it for just about anybody to be able to buy it okay right so if if something is worth 600 or a thousand dollars and you can finance it for less than 100 bucks a month um how quickly could could the lowest paid person out there earn a hundred dollars right right one day one day's worth of work if you make a low wage right so so that's one day's worth of work of the span of your life is not a lot of money right so uh and that's how i look at this stuff that both of these pieces of equipment are very achievable um and if it's something that you want to do and you want to get something commercial grade meaning it's designed for a business extremely affordable so now that we got that conversation out of the way yep um so i guess i guess i just want to make the point your first decision point is is eight and a half by eleven designs is that appropriate for what you wanna do so is it in the budget and will it fit your idea of what you have in your business or do you need something bigger because you anticipate doing larger designs sublimating larger items etc exactly exactly but these are two great systems they're designed for this and they come pretty much ready to go out of the box with kits that you get from cold sea now the the other thing you need with sublimation is we did mention that you need to heat right you apply heat with sublimation that's how the uh the transfer gets put onto your your item right whether it's a t-shirt or a mug um so you need a heat press machine um and a heat press machine is going to be um a couple hundred bucks to a couple thousand bucks yep and you're always good that's that's almost a constant need if you if you're going to make custom t-shirts you will need a heat press machine regardless of what piece of equipment you get yeah right so it's yeah well just before we said you can finance it for 50 100 150 200 a month those packages usually include a heat press yep at that price uh so uh types of heat presses is just a little mini conversation i think to have here for those those folks who don't know right uh you want to tell us about some heat presses yeah so um and really this applies to either technology is is when most people think about a heat press um they think about a standard kind of clam shell design right they're square or they're rectangular and they're designed to put a shirt in it's flat to press a transfer or piece of paper down on it or vinyl or whatever you've got but you know you can also get one that specializes in mugs you know so it you put a mug into it it's shaped appropriately so hopefully if you do it right your mug does not get crushed you could never put a mug into a flat heat press you can just visualize that for a second and uh there's also a a cap press which i highly recommend because i think custom caps are a great idea but you can see again you know if you're going to heat press something on the on the front of a cap you're not going to be able to get that transfer to form around the cap using a using a flat heat press especially if it's you know a trucker's cap that's got some dimension to it you know you're just going to destroy it so you know you've got different heat press configurations flat cap mug there's also less common ones like for um there's a ball press there are heat presses that do a better job on koozies you know maybe they've got attachments for koozies there's just plates uh there's once you get into this world of customizing different things there's a wide variety of heat presses heat presses you can use and that you can add to your business however 99 of them are flat you know 99 of the heat presses bundled with either one of these printers or just a standard flat heat press yeah it's the it's it's gonna be your most versatile right because we say t-shirts but t-shirts also means any apparel sweater shorts sweatpants onesies flat things yeah yeah headbands you know anything that you can press flat right and then that's all other flat things so we sell um picture picture frames photo frames for the wall you can print um like what if you're watching the video mark has a cool uh uh painting from tampa in his background of the video and uh if you had that digital file you can print up to a 13 by 19 of that you know like um and then sublimate it onto a very specific material that's designed to create a very elegant wall hanging yeah metal and he's created a sign a friend of mine has a business that that's only what they do that's literally what they do um is they print on sign materials with sublimation um so um you decide what kind of heat press you need and your printer so relatively speaking you're gonna start this um somewhere in the 600 range if you already own some stuff up to a couple thousand dollar range um and you can go even higher with bigger and more stuff but but you can get this whole thing financed um for 100 200 300 a month or or even less so so would you say i mean just to kind of nail things down if you got the sg 500 and an inexpensive 15-inch heat press you could get out for a thousand dollars i would say i would say 1500 is is kind of the realistic number that i would push for okay because that is also going to get you some other things that we talk about in other podcasts but um you're probably going to want to try this before you sell it to anybody so you're going to buy some mugs that you're just gonna make and maybe right or or blank t-shirts or t-shirts source or stuff like that you know you're gonna buy some things to practice and learn on you're gonna make mistakes you're gonna mother's day is coming up so you're just gonna make a handful of mother's mugs just just for practicing and maybe give them to um your mothers i don't know how many you have but six you know um we're not gonna judge i mean maybe you do uh and uh so you're gonna want some practice stuff you're to buy some like mark mentioned some paper there might be some accessories you think about there is actually one thing mark is um you can buy a flat heat press and then for under 50 bucks i forget the exact number you can buy a wrap for mugs that's right and put it in your oven at home and actually make mugs in your oven um using a specialty kind of silicone wrap so you might you might say you know what i want one of those wrapped and actually i'm going to want to make more than one mug at a time so i'm going to get three wraps maybe right um uh you may also want to get some heat gloves because you're working with a bunch of hot stuff so i say 1500 bucks is a pretty good number on the low end get started realistically yeah and that's that's really what we want you know so because a lot of times you'll see advertisements and and we we do it too because you can just buy the printer yeah and we try to convince you in as many ways as we can that you don't you never just want to buy the printer you know so um realistically you spend 1500 bucks you're you're off to the races yeah i mean you're you're like legit starting your business for that okay so let's talk about pros and cons and sublimation so pro i'll start with some pros yeah it's just super versatile yeah t-shirts sweaters polo shirts mugs key chains luggage tags coasters mouse pads wall signs aluminum slate i mean there's just so many things that we on coleman and company.com

um c-o-l-m-a-n and company.com uh if you go to the menu all the way on the on the side you'll see wholesale blanks and there's sections just for sublimation stuff you're gonna just shop and be like it's crazy another one and another one another there's tons and there's some great videos too on what that stuff can look like there's tons of videos on how to do it instructions everything um so it's very versatile it's pretty easy to use right if you go through the training and you practice a little bit i mean you're you're gonna pat you're gonna be able to make mugs that people will want to buy like right away and you know i gotta say that something that sawgrass does really well as well as a manufacturer one of the reasons that we sell that particular printer and not just go down to um you know or order an inkjet printer on amazon and try to convert it you know we use sawgrass because they work really well but also because they have a really good training program so um normally we have to develop one for the um for the equipment that we sell saw grass was an exception yeah so so you can get great training one of the folks on the phones at coldse that will help out with sublimation um him and i believe his brother if i recall um they bought um they have one of those like uh they took a printer where they converted it to sublimation yeah and i asked him one day i said hey um because we don't make stuff at cold sea we sell the equipment i said hey i actually want to get a bunch of stuff made you do that right and he's like you're not going to get the quality that we make here at cold sea with the frankenstein machine right you know he's like it's different so is that what you want you know because i had mentioned that i was looking for something really high quality so you know these these are super high quality top of the line type of prints you're going to get yeah okay um so uh it's but it's pretty easy to use and learn uh it feels and washes great in general and looks great i'm just gonna say nothing feels like it's not there like sublimation feels like it's not there yeah right because it becomes part of the of the item you know it's not a it's not an additive it's in it you know it's part of it now yes yeah that's exactly what's happening is that when you heat it up the material of the shirt or the sign or the mug microscopically kind of opens up when it gets hot and then it opens up and then all the color shoots falls right inside of the material and then when it cools down it closes back up and the color is trapped in there it's like it's like it's like the venus fly trap of apparel decoration it very much is except i don't think you can see the fly inside it but if it was clear oh i don't we should move on okay let's do that so um it is it's also something that that definitely works like it's not it's not new it is a proven technology it's something that you know works all the time it works very consistently it's a good solid professional and yet inexpensive application yep and sawgrass printers have been around for a really long time there's tons and tons of them out in the market tons of people been using them all over the place all over the world globally yeah producing i would say there's probably a hundred percent chance you own or have owned something that was produced on one of those printers oh yeah i imagine so especially if you fish anything to do with fishing that seems to be big fishing everybody sublimates fishing a lot of mugs a lot of t-shirts a lot of decorative things you could have bought from your house you know for your house or seen in the business you know um they're one of our customers i know mentioned that he made the signs for inside the dentist office with the sublimation printer so a bunch of people have gone to the dentist and looked up at those signs and they were made with a printer that you can buy and own um which is cool um and then the last pro is that there's just so many blanks and options that we mentioned earlier you know luggage tags and coasters and and gaming mouse pads there's so many things you could decorate with sublimation um that uh once you kind of get some customers and you can start to sell to them there's tons of accessories you can add on to your orders or help them with next time they they want something customized yeah that's great and it's also both of these that we're going to talk about it's also a great add-on for anything else you might own for the same the same thing so i guess that leaves the cons to me sure once you did the pros um so uh sublimation is an ink process it's like uh a better version of your ancient printer at home and whenever you have liquid inks um you've got to think about things involving liquid inks which include you know some maintenance because if you're not using liquid inks that they tend to dry and settle on the bottom of the cartridges and that will mess up a print so you know occasionally you do have to clean um you can't store your liquid inks or your paper you know in the garage if it's too humid or if it gets down below zero you know or something like that you know you do have to be careful about storing that kind of thing you uh probably the biggest drawback in my mind is that you have to use sublimatable blanks so the sublimation works on polyester it works on synthetic materials so that's fine it's pretty easy to identify a polyester shirt 100 polyester and press it on there um but if you if you start drifting into things like it's it's a polyester blend or it's a tri blend the sublimation is not going to perform as well because during that heating and sublimating process it's not going to bond a cotton right so it's not going to stay there you're going to if it stays you're going to end up with a very dull image and you run the danger of it washing off if it's on 100 polyester especially if the shirt is designed for sublimation like uh vapor apparel that coleman company carries it's amazing but if you start you know running along the edges of whether or not it's a hundred percent or it's not really polyester it's some other synthetic blend then you're then you're in a little bit of trouble yeah and and one comment on that is that that con it can be a pro too which is interesting because um your customer is not just going to say hey can i just go to michael's and get some mugs or get some blank t-shirts at walmart and give them to you yeah right is is you will need to buy you're going to buy them from a wholesaler um as a blank and that does give you the opportunity to kind of buy them at a wholesale price and mark up the blank and the print kind of all in one you know um where embroidery can go on anything and then as and and some customers some businesses i talked to a lady the other day actually um everybody has to bring something to her to me yeah for her embroidery right it's crazy and uh and uh and she loses out on some of the blanks but she's just not interested in that right that's her business right um but it is nice controlling the blanks because you know what you're making you know how it's going to come you know how to get another one if a mistake is made and if the customer 30 days later says you know what i'd love 10 more of those you know where to get them or you might even have them in your own stock so that con can be a little bit of a pro because you it does allow you to control what you're selling a little bit um more because the customer can that's a that's a good spin i'm still going to leave it in the con category yeah it is it is it's it's less convenient than being able to use anything yes um so also um it only works on light colored items so the um the way color works is that if you if you imagine if you've got a dark gray wall in your house and you want to paint it a a light blue or a yellow or something like that when you if you just start painting right on it if it doesn't have a primer in it it's going to look dull it's going to look terrible it won't look like the yellow or the blue that you wanted it to because you're using that gray as a base well now imagine that that color wall that dark colored wall is a dark t-shirt well sublimation does not have white ink that's not a possibility so you're going to be laying whatever color you have so like if you take a dark red or a dark blue polyester shirt even if you can sublimate on it when you apply that transfer on it it's not going to look good because there's no white ink all the colors will look muted dark it'll look wrong so there's no lighting so again it's it's another in my eyes it's another limitation yeah and and it reminds me of um painting but you mentioned painting like painting on a wall yeah if you if you um if you were to purchase uh a house and all the walls were black and you wanted to repaint them you know as you were mentioning um typically if you go to the paint store they're gonna tell you to prime the wall first right even if you have paint and primer in one you know that black paint not gonna make it it's not gonna make it so so use primer and primer is white because then the next color you put on top of it is gonna really pop out um the other examples i give you if you spill uh spaghetti spaghetti sauce on a white t-shirt you can really see it if you spill it on the black t-shirt kind of hides um and that would be the same thing you you put you put a red sublimation on the black t-shirt you're barely gonna see it just like that spaghetti sauce mark villa was eyeballing my black polo just specifically for that reason because i just got back from lunch um so another another one is that um that heat press has to be hot so um you've got to heat your heat press up to about 400 degrees to do a sublimation um transfer print and that is going to sit in your back office it's going to sit in your in your home it's going to sit in that mall kiosk and if you're doing large runs you will be uh sticking your head in and out of the oven all day does that make sense yeah yeah it's hot it's like it's just like it's like working in the kitchen right now um you're gonna be around a 400 degree oven so it's going to be hot um and uh and you'll feel it you know because you have to work around and near the heat just like in a kitchen yeah and i do want to point out that in like a lot of uh cheaper heat presses like if you've got a craft press off amazon or something like that uh they're a clam shell design which means that i i'm doing a motion right so it means a it hinges open like the hood of a car or your trunk or a clam or a clam so just just like that so and you're gonna be putting putting your hands in there you're gonna be putting threading the shirt on the platen or you know laying the transfer down or putting a transfer sheet on top and your hands are going to be very close to that 400 degree surface and the smaller the press is normally the closer your hands are to the hot part of the oven so that's why one of the things in the kit that mark vela mentioned were the heat gloves specifically so that doesn't happen yeah uh and just uh since you're talking about heat presses i mean a good heat press is um paramount to your success uh cheap presses or craft heat presses um are not meant for commercial they're usually really slow you know some of those really low temperature heat presses um you know it takes five minutes to make something and right when when you're done in 30 seconds or a minute you know with something commercial grade um and it's also designed to stay on all day and do production runs compared to craft stuff is not really it's gonna say on the box not meant for commercial use right and then so don't buy that for your business um there's a good reason why that's there okay uh i think we beat up uh we've we've beat up sublimation enough yeah the the last little bit though is that because it requires heat that does mean um you can't put it on anything that you can't get huh or you can't fit in a heat press good point um so you can't do body art or a car or window i mean i mean you could you can't it's gonna suck yeah it's gonna it's gonna be terrible well uh so there you go there's a a a good amount about sublimation and now we can move on to uh vinyl yeah the other contender so uh what's vinyl cutting i mean you do it all the time mark velo this is like your we talk about it in the office all the time how much mark um likes and gets great use out of the the graphtec cutter the cut and press system that we've got in our in uh showroom two um at the coal decision i do uh like vinyl cutting a lot i think it's cool i think it's i think there's just it's it's great i love sublimation too but uh we we uh i was doing vinyl cutting before i was doing sublimation at work so uh if this is a process where you take a rolled material vinyl um it's usually some sort of a polyurethane or a pvc type of material for the sciencey uh out there and uh on the back of that material there is either a um a heat applied glue or a pressure sensitive type of glue so basically a sticker or heat transfer um depending on the material that you buy and uh i kind of think this is another cooking reference it's like making christmas cookies right you have you have a rolled out dough and you have your cookie cutter and the cookie cutter punches out your shapes and then you pull the shapes out um or you pull away all the dough you're not going to use and throw that aside and then all your shapes go in the oven and that's great that's a great analogy i like that yeah the vinyl cutter cup vinyl comes in a roll you don't have to roll it out yourself which is nice um it comes in a roll uh you put it in a cutting machine it will cut out your shapes you pull out everything uh that you don't want so you're just left with just the shapes and then those shapes go on uh a t-shirt or uh a mug or tumbler or a sign or something like that yeah you know i think that you've got to see the video of making a shirt if you've never seen somebody use um like a cricket is a vinyl cutter for example um if you've never seen somebody use one um or one of the professional versions like like we sell then you really do have to have to see a video it's it it used to be called a cutting plotter because what you're doing really is you are you're creating a design in your computer and then it it traces out the design on the vinyl with the razor blade and and that's what makes the cuts and that's what provides the weed so the razor blade is the cookie um cutter itself right it's just kind of tracing the design instead of with a pencil instead of plot you know with a with a pencil like a plotter it's cutting and that's what uh that's what gives you the the material to peel yep and uh and then you can do whatever you want with that that you cut um so we'll talk about the same order cost to getting started on that um it's pretty darn close um a uh one of the cutters we recommend is the graphtec ce 7000 and it's on you can see it on colemancompany.com um and uh that's around thirteen hundred dollars and uh same thing you can finance a package with that cutter for you know 50 to 150 a month or something like that you know ish in that range um and there's some larger ones too um that get closer to two thousand dollars um and then there's even a cutter that will print too and we could talk about that a little bit you know the roll in bn20a and that's closer that's getting a little more expensive that's not falling into the cheapest range it's about six thousand dollars or or a couple hundred bucks a month um just for that printer but that's your range kind of of cutters right there pretty close to the same price um you can get started um maybe a little bit more i think i think it's you're probably a little closer to 2 000-ish okay that that's that's with the cutter itself the the vinyl supplies a decent heat press etc yup yeah a couple rolls of vinyl to get you started a couple some practice shirts um if you want to do a small heat press now of course that can go up um to you know 3 000 or 4 000 depending on what accessories you want to buy right there's tons of accessories but you can get started for a couple thousand bucks and be kind of ready to go so i i think i want to make a couple of differentiations here because the first of all it's the same fundamental technology that something like a cricket uses so instead of traditionally instead of using a sheet although you can use sheets of vinyl inside the professional cutters as well um you have the opportunity to use a roll and how big are the rolls generally mark so um you could buy the typical size for a compact size roll um is going to be uh about 15 inches wide and about five yards okay so so so you end up spending significantly less on the per design cost than you would with a craft cutter and just to differentiate that more is that it's much quieter much faster and the bigger it is the more exponentially productive it gets so not only can you do much long larger designs and longer designs um you can do more smaller ones you know so so it really does kind of kind of accelerate uh there's there's very little comparison between the 300 craft cutter and the performance on this graphtec entry level cutter um they're completely different as far as if you wanted to move um a few bags of concrete right um just a different kind of random example but i saw this the other day um if you had a little golf cart you could put some a few couple bags of concrete on there and you could drive it a mile down the road and you could transport your concrete right um terrible idea if you owned a business where you did concrete to think you're going to do it with a golf cart it's like 20 trips to home depot or lowe's that's great it's back and forth your battery's gonna die a ton of times before the job's even done you're just wasting time right and then the golf cart's gonna die way sooner than its normal life because you're dropping 500 pounds of concrete on it 20 times a day that's that's kind of like operating a cricket or a silhouette a hobby machine that you can buy from a hobby store um to do a business right and now i'll also say yeah on the other on the other end this 15-inch cutter that we sell a bunch of it's great um it's one we have in the showroom uh is at the entry level point for um for commercial cutters right it's at the entry level it is a professional professional machine performs beautifully but they get um they get much bigger you get you know i mean what's the next level up is 24 inches oh yeah 24 inch the ce 7000-60 yeah and then there's a dash 120 and then there's roland um cutters as well uh and then there's the print and cut machines and then they get they get really really big if your business you know grows or where you know they fit and you know they're the size of a room of a large room yeah um but i think it is important because that's that's a common thing with cutters is someone says well why would i buy it a 1300 cutter when a cricket's just a few hundred bucks and i would just say well why would somebody buy a pickup truck instead of a golf cart why doesn't just every construction company own a golf cart right it just doesn't make sense to do that now um they could do one job with a golf cart and they could even do some little jobs with it but but as soon as they get a pickup truck and they're like dang one trip to home depot to do a job right it's mind-blowing and that's kind of what this is you know you could print um or cut you know all of your t-shirts in one click of a button super fast you know 10 times faster than a hobby or machine 10 times cheaper for the materials in a hobby machine and you're actually doing um efficient business and then it's not going to break down on you no it's not going to break down because designed to be run and used like a commercial piece of machine is designed for there you go so um how about if i do the pros this time okay now before we jump into those there's one comment about buying a kit that's it's it's not in the pro con yet but it kind of is is you actually don't always need a heat press when you're cutting right so for sublimation you always need that heat press your cutter kit might not start with a heat press if you're just going to be doing signs and stickers and adhesive type of materials right so that's a thing to consider and that's why the prices kind of line up depending what you're going to buy so for 1500 you're ready to start you know right away um almost on both of them especially on the cutter side if you don't need to heat press right but you will need a heat press if you want to do t-shirts if you want to do t-shirts you won't you will right so let's go into um pros tell us what's the good stuff okay so um i love these things uh the because like a sublimation printer they're super versatile um but into different areas like you can still decorate they're great on t-shirts i mean if you've seen numbers on a jersey or gosh i mean if you go into retail stores and you see glitter glitter decorations that are better a single color the vinyl is everywhere heat transfinal transfer vinyl is everywhere because you can do so many things with it like mark villa said you can create signs we've got signs in our building that um that a local sign shop did for us using a vinyl cutter um you can use uh transfer vinyl to make stickers you can put it on your car you can put it on a locker you can put it on mugs you can put it on um sports balls for trophies you could use it to do signage on windows and doors there's just tons of different ways that you can use it both for apparel and for hard goods yup um it's also pretty easy to learn i think one of the sleeper advantages is to the graphtec line if you're using like these rolls of vinyl like we're talking about is um you don't have the ability to do full color but you don't have to do full color that's an advantage so it's the difference between uh once you get into like printing photos and printing color graphics and everything you start dealing with things like is the color right is the relationship between the colors right you know does the color change when i heat press it there's a lot that goes in in are you doing photoshop or you're doing retouching of the graphic before you print it and with the cutter it is really just a series of outlines and you're changing the color you're deciding whether it's glitter or a different texture you know maybe it's mermaid or whatever the the special maybe it's leopard print whatever the um your heat transfer vinyl of choice is that's what tells you what the pattern is going to look like that's the color and the pattern on the design itself all you're really doing is creating the outline and to me that makes it significantly easier to learn because i can't do photoshop okay it also depending on the vinyl um it feels amazing and i'm going to uh plug uh triton and mark villa here because uh it took uh more than a year i think for us to to develop triton vinyl working with the factory trying to uh pick just the right just the right color set and how how thick it is and how easily it weeds and how long it takes to press and the colors that are that are available it took us a long time to do that and the results are outstanding so i would put if you get which and it's no more expensive than than other brands on the market if you use triton vinyl it'll it feels amazing and it will basically last as long as a shirt okay um it's also something else that's another proven technology it's not you're not reinventing the wheel you're not discovering anything new um there have been cutters around since i was a kid and i'm 112 years old there you go so it's been around for a long time it almost doesn't does it really matter what kind of a blank you put it on if it's an apparel yeah i mean almost not almost not yeah if you can put if it'll last through a heat press then it doesn't matter yeah pretty much pretty much there's some weird materials out there just like anything there's always an asterisk with decorating apparel period no matter what you're doing but you can feel pretty confident that almost anything you can buy you can put heat transfer vinyl on which is cool yeah and and you know you can you can do stickers which is which is terrific and super super popular um but also people get so creative with things like mirrored vinyl and glitter vinyl and flock which it has kind of a fabric-y feel you know which is kind of cool there's there's tons of specialty vinyl that you can get for specialty applications so just because you can't do full color prints or photos or full color graphics doesn't mean you can't you know really let your creativity come through and you can definitely see that in some of the designs that um that we've done for our videos uh especially with mixed media but we've got a trucker cap one where we did like a glitter red heart on a truck on a cap and then the rest of it was just a regular heat transfer vinyl looks terrific so definitely that that versatility uh along with the price and the customer satisfaction that comes when you when you deliver a heat transfer vinyl good is is great yeah but what uh this is you know these covers like this are used by every large apparel manufacturer out there you know if you get a nike shirt there's swoops that were cut with it with with a cutter you know um so so that is that is really great it's it's something really high quality but there are some cons we got to talk about them because this is a this is a pro con thing right yep uh so one of the one of the big cons is um cutting vinyls one color at a time so with sublimation if you have a logo that's three colors you click print and just like your printer at home it prints all three colors at once and you put that on the shirt and all three colors go on the shirt at once it's great um but uh with vinyl you're gonna do one color at a time so if you have a three color logo you're gonna cut color one cut color two cut color three heat press color one heat press color two heat press color three um it it's a little time consuming it can be a little time consuming and depending on the design um this is i'm going to slide out a pro con and just say depending on the design sublimation could be faster or vinyl cutting could be faster depending on the design the size what it is how many colors and it's not necessarily uh one color is always faster on vinyl or one color is always faster on sublimation but it is more time consuming period that the fact that you have to be hands on so you have to be in front of your cutter moving materials cutting materials weeding materials heat pressing materials that's a good point um now uh it's because it is one color at a time that means every color you have you have a roll of material so if you have 20 different colors you need you have to buy 20 rolls of material and you have to store 20 rolls of material so it takes up a bunch of space and if your customer wants a special color of gold you don't have you've got to buy a whole roll of material just to do that now the good news is it doesn't go bad last super long time but you still it's still inventory you have to carry um talking about that is you do lose the ability for full color prints that mark mentioned earlier so you can't print puppies or babies so so i i just want to i just want to yeah specify you don't mean you can't print on puppies and babies or babies you can't print pictures of puppies or babies both both okay you can't do either one okay yes you cannot do either one of those good um after i finish my cons i'll tell you about how you can potentially print on a child though trust me because you've done it i know okay so um uh and then uh if you have a more complicated design and if you have more colors it can take significantly longer to make than if you have a digital printer so i'll kind of explain that to you in a way the uh mcdonald's logo it's an m two arches yep cutting that in vinyl is gonna take like five seconds literally for a full-size shirt cut out an m and then you peel it and then and so cutting it super simple weeding it when you pull out the excess simple it's one pull off right yeah because it's just an m now um the uh your state your local state seal because i've seen some state they're usually super complicated there's like a justice lady holding a scale maybe and there's like wheat you know like that you know no one knows why yeah i don't know why there's a bird but there's a bird usually there's some sort of animal um and those are complicated if you're going to cut that out it's going to take a while to cut and then you have to pull out you know all of the you know all the little pieces and parts to get your design it's going to take a long time to do like sometimes really long so long that you're going to refuse to do it because you can't sell it if you're smart yeah if you're smart because i'm cuz because it could take you you know a half hour or 30 minutes just to make one shirt where if it was digitally printed on sublimation to be done in seconds um so that is a con is that you get to a level of complication where you just kind of don't you just don't do it you have to offer your customer alternatives yeah and i i just want to point out like mark field is wearing the cold essie logo on his shirt which you could definitely do in vinyl yeah but even the the o and the e you would have to stop and pick out the centers where in sublimation you would not yeah so that's just like a really small example and i think this is a good example if i needed to do um a dozen of these sublimation is going to be much faster even though it's not that complicated just because we've got one two three four five colors six actually because there's a little gray line six colors and a bunch of little details it's just gonna take much longer um so this is an example of where sublimation would beat it in speed now we'll wrap it up but before that we can talk about printing on children because i promise that um but an interesting thing is um you can buy um a glue and glitter and and things like that that are like makeup they're designed for skin application okay and you can buy uh sticker materials that are safe for that too which means literally you can print out a stencil and you could stick it onto somebody's arm and then you can paint on it with the with the with the makeup glue and glitter and things like that and then peel it off and your vinyl cutter can actually make stencils for doing uh decorations on people wow yeah yeah so i've done uh i've cut out a bunch of vinyl and bought that stuff off the internet and uh gone to like my kids birthday party and did glitter glitter tattoos for all the little kids cool and then and then one of the friends said can you bring that when my party next week so i got a gig right away you got a gig out of it yeah yeah and then you broke the news that those tattoos are permanent you were just kidding about that sorry but always go

2022-05-09 17:33

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