SCREEN PRINTING BUSINESS

When you hear «screen printing», your mind probably goes to decorative applications: t-shirts, sweatshirts, hats and signs. If you’re a screen printing professional, you might be concerned about the future of your craft, as other printing methods like direct-to-garment printing have encroached on screen printing’s traditional turf. The good news is that there’s much more to screen printing than apparel and promotional items.

Is your screen printing shop ready to upgrade to an automatic screen printing press? If you’re consistently struggling to keep up with customer demand on your current manual setup, or if you’ve hit the point where you feel you need to increase your staffing, it’s probably time to start seriously considering an automatic press.

In the competitive world of screen printing, you have to offer services to your customers that make your screen printing business stand out. Finishing services – such as relabeling, hang tagging, bagging or specialty packing – could be what makes a potential customer choose your shop over a competitor’s.

An automatic screen printing press is an exciting addition to any shop’s production floor. Automatic presses speed up production time, so press runs that used to take a day now only take hours. However, screen printing shops that adopt automatics shouldn’t be too fast to retire their manual screen printing presses.

You’ve decided to go for it and make contract printing a part of your business. You know it’ll be very competitive, so you’ve got to carefully evaluate what you’ll offer and at what cost.

«Green» living has gone beyond a fad and become a part of the modern fabric. While there have been garment brands offering environmentally friendly apparel – and screen printing shops specializing in green printing – for decades, eco-friendly clothing has gone mainstream.

Are you looking for a way to increase your output and your profit? Do you have lulls in your regular screen printing schedule that you’d like to fill with work?

From the traditional to the digital, you have an arsenal of marketing tools at your disposal. The reality, however, is that your biggest marketing tool is also one of the most basic elements of your business: Your website.

People have become accustomed to a constant barrage of internet advertising, from spam in their email inboxes to «sponsored» social media posts to banner and pop-up ads on every website. With such information overload, people have also become accustomed to tuning out all of that extraneous information.

As a small business owner, you may struggle to decide where to allocate a limited marketing budget, thinking it will only cover either digital or traditional marketing, not both. Which is right for you?

Once dismissed as a fad, social media marketing now should be an integral part of any small business’s marketing strategy. Through social media, businesses can connect with existing and potential customers and tailor marketing messages to their target customers.

You likely went into the screen printing business because you enjoy designing and printing – marketing probably wasn’t a skillset that was on your mind. But without effective marketing, your business can’t succeed. Your potential customers need to know who you are and understand why they should be doing business with you.