Schools can bring a lot of business to your screen printing shop, from team uniforms and warm-up gear to student uniforms and school “spirit wear”. If you can contract with a school, or a school’s supporting organizations, you can find a steady flow of work for your screen printing shop.

Screen printing involves so many different variables, it can be difficult to make sure you’re getting good results every time. Some issues may not even show up until after you’ve delivered the garments to the customer. It’s not always easy, but in order to keep your customers happy you must make every effort to control the quality of your prints.

Screen printing customers love fleece, whether it’s hoodies for a school team or a trendy zip-up with a great art print. Screen printers’ affection for fleece, however, tends to be a little more limited. Getting good results on fleece can be a challenge, and a misprint can be a costly mistake because of the much higher cost of fleece garments compared to t-shirts.

When you think of screen printed products, shirts are probably the first item that comes to mind. But you definitely shouldn’t stop there! There’s a whole world of different materials waiting to be screen printed, and expanding your offerings will help you attract new customers and keep old ones coming back for more.

In the screen printing world, a myth surrounds specialty inks. Screen printers often avoid puff, glow-in-the-dark, metallic and gel inks because they’re considered difficult to work with.

Your screen printing business is nothing without its customers. However, from time to time you’ll come across some clients that are more difficult to deal with than others. Some might be impossibly picky; others may have unrealistic expectations for what you can deliver. The key to keeping customers happy is communication.

Feeling squeezed by the restrictions of a standard-sized screen print? If your creativity can’t be contained in your usual print size, you may want to give oversized printing a try. To really push the envelope, you can print whole backs and fronts of shirts, or even try all-over printing.

In a recent blog post, we covered seven screen printing tips to improve the quality of your products. Today, we’re expanding upon that by exploring seven screen printing mistakes to help you avoid saying, “I will never make that mistake again.”

Blurry prints. Smudged or rough ink. Improper registration. Images that wear away when washed. As a screen printer, these are some of the common problems you work to avoid. Every misprint costs money, and problem prints that make it into your customers’ hands can damage your business’s reputation.

To survive in the t-shirt screen printing industry – let alone be successful – your business must maintain healthy relationships with its customers as well as its competitors. You could be the most experienced screen printer this side of the sun but nobody will know it without a strong presence and reputation in the field. There are many ways to build and improve your screen printing business. Here are a few suggestions that are sure to increase your visibility in the t-shirt screen printing community and attract new customers…

Traffic, gas prices, long car rides – the morning commute to work can be a real pain. And once you arrive, you’re spending long hours making money for someone else and missing out on what’s most important – your family.

Visited a screen printing trade show lately? If you’re a manual printer who’s just seen an automatic press in action, you might think “there’s no way I can keep pushing a squeegee!”