Custom clothes business help?

[entrepreneur640]

I am interested in making and selling my own custom shirts. i would also like to make custom shirts for teams or whatever a customer wants. i know years ago they had the shirt presses. what are people doing now and how do i get started?

[SeasonEnds]

There are different methods of printing shirts. Industry standard is usually screen printing. There is also heat pressing, direct to garment (DTG) and a few other methods. First you need to decide what you want to sell. Do you want to print the shirts yourself, or outsource them? How much money do you have to spend on equipment if you will print yourself? Go to t-shirtforums.com. It is the best forum you can possibly find for all things t-shirt business related.

[entrepreneur640]

yes i would like to do them myself. and as far as start up goes i have some money for start up but do you have an estimate as to what it would be?

[SeasonEnds]

It depends on how you plan on printing the designs and what type of printing you want to do. Do you have your own designs that you want to print? If so, how many colors are they? Do you plan on printing lots of shirts at once, a few shirts here and there?

You can buy a cheap 4 color screenprinting start up package for a little over 1,000. I recommend getting a NICE 16x20 heatpress for 1,000 bucks instead. Pay for a screenprinter to print your designs with plastisol ink on to opaque transfer paper and send them back to you. All you will have to do once a shirt is ordered is heat press them onto the shirt and ship out the product.

If you plan on doing large runs, you can still do it that way too. If you want to cut out costs, and have alot of space, and a decent amount of start up money, you can buy like a 6 color 4 station press for a 3-6 thousand, and all the necessary equipment for a few thousand more. This will allow you to do large runs of shirts. There is more of a learning curve with this option, and it is not as easy as you think.

There are alot of print shirts and get rich schemes out there. The real thing requires alot of skill and patience. It can also be pretty expensive.