Show Notes
So you want to start a t-shirt business on a budget. The two cheapest / lowest cost ways to start are with sublimation and HTV (Heat Transfer Vinyl).
But what is the difference between Sublimation and HTV?
Which is better: Sublimation or Heat Transfer Vinyl?
Which is cheaper?
In this episode we are going to deep dive into both Sublimation and HTV to help you pick the best for your new business.
Why is HTV or Sublimation right for you?
First we will start who should get either of these.
- You want to customize t-shirts (or mugs or tumblers or more)
- You want to be able to operate in a small footprint
- You don’t want to be concerned about special electricity or venting etc
- You want something relatively easy to learn
- You want to get something that’s versatile
- You want to start on a small budget.
Sublimation
What is sublimation?
This is printing with an inkjet printer to a specialty paper. This paper and ink combination reacts with certain ‘sublimation blanks’ to transfer the print to the substrate. This process works on t-shirts, hats, mugs, mouse pads, keychains, towels and tons of other goods.
Cost to get started
The SG500 is the best option for starting on a small budget. You can purchase a printer like this for just over $600 or finance a sublimation package for around $50 a month.
The next step up is the SG1000, This is just a bigger version of the printer. Bigger means bigger prints and faster production. This printer is just over $1500 and you can finance kits for this for around $100-200 a month.
You will also want to get a heat press machine. These can range from a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars a month (by the way when we mentioned financing packages before, those often include a heat press. )
The heat press machine will be based on what you want to make.
- Flat heat presses – these will work for t-shirts, mouse pads, key chains, etc.
- Cap heat presses – these work for hats and other curved items.
- Mug Heat Press – Designed for cylinder shaped items like a mug or tumbler
PROs
- Super versatile
- Pretty easy to use and learn
- ‘Feels’ and ‘washes’ great
- Proven technology
- Tons of options for blanks from luggage tags to t-shirts to coasters
CONs
- Inkjet systems do require some maintenance.
- Need to use ‘sublimation blanks’ (also a can be a pro since YOU have to provide the blanks, customer cannot ask to go to walmart and buy shirts)
- Only works on light colored items
- It’s HOT – nearly 400 degrees to sublimate
- Everything requires heat (no stickers or car windows or body art)
Heat Transfer Vinyl (HTV) and Other Vinyl
What is Vinyl Cutting?
This is a process where you take a rolled material and run it through a cutting machine. It is kind of like how you make Christmas cookies. You roll out the dough, cut out your shapes and put the shapes in the oven.
Vinyl comes on a roll. You roll it through a cutting machine, then put your cut-out shapes on t-shirts, or tumblers, or signs.
Cost to get Started
We recommend the Graphtec and Roland brand of cutters. The lowest cost of entry on these is the Graphtec CE7000-40 which is around $1300 and kits can be financed for around $50-150 a month. You can also get larger cutters for closer to $2000 and even a system that prints and cuts (the Roland BN-20a for about $6000 or under $200 a month).
Similar to above, you also want to consider about getting a heat press.
One thing to note is that cutters don’t always need a heat press, because you can also cut sticker materials that adhere to glass, cars, signs, etc. which don’t require a heat press.
PROs
- Super versatile
- Pretty easy to use and learn
- ‘Feels’ and ‘washes’ great (depending on the material you buy – Triton vinyl is A+)
- Proven technology
- Use almost any blank
- Print stickers also
- Cut interesting materials like glitter or flock or reflective
CONS
- One color at a time!
- Rolls of material take up space – if you have 20 colors, that’s 20 rolls
- Cannot print full color (like a puppy or baby) – unless using a BN-20A
- More colors & more complicated designs take longer
Both of these systems are great and they are useful on day one of your business, and 10 years later. These can be considered like a great plan for someone just getting started.
Transcript
Mark Stephenson:
Hey, everyone. And welcome to episode 172 on yet another episode of the Custom Apparel Startups Podcast. This is Mark Stephenson.
Marc Vila:
And this is Marc Vila. And today we’re here to talk about the two cheapest ways to start a T-shirt business, sublimation versus vinyl.
Mark Stephenson:
I think though that we need to go back and listen to whatever the last podcast that we did about preparation, because 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. Cheap ways to make custom T-shirts, always a hot topic, especially when you’re talking about making actually professional quality. It could have been better phrased maybe, inexpensive ways to get into the custom T-shirt business producing high quality goods for your customers.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. I like that better, but you wouldn’t have clicked on it probably.
Mark Stephenson:
No. Yeah. Yeah. Cheap definitely got you guys’ attention.
Marc Vila:
Well, on the second time, I decided to make the sublimation versus vinyl more dramatic.
Mark Stephenson:
Okay.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, if you noticed. I didn’t know if you noticed.
Mark Stephenson:
I didn’t notice that. I was already thinking what I was going to say. I really don’t hear much of what you say, but anyway, so this is a great topic. Not only because, I mean, if you’re listening to the Custom Apparel Startups Podcast, that’s probably on your to-do list is to get into the custom apparel business or customization of some kind. And we talk a lot about white toner printing and we talk about direct to garment, and embroidery, and the business in general, but we realize that a lot of our potential customers at Coldesi and Colman and Company, are starting on a really small budget. 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.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, I think it’s great. And this actually comes right after an episode about kind of a guaranteed success plan for when you’re starting on a really small budget too.
Mark Stephenson:
Oh, yeah.
Marc Vila:
So this 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, we talk about how you can guarantee yourself some success. And so in this episode, we’re going to talk about, first of all, are these methods good for you? Which would be heat transfer vinyl and sublimation for making custom T-shirts and more. It’s about the T-shirt business, but it’s about a ton of other things too, so we’ll get into those. We’re going to talk about which one’s better, which by the way, it’s a trick question because with all the equipment we sell, there’s no better, there’s what’s better for you. We’ll talk about which one’s cheaper, all that stuff.
There’s a lot of great information and we can go through a ton of it, but Mark, why don’t we go ahead and start with, how do we know if either of these is right for you or for those of you listening out there? How do we know if heat transfer vinyl, or vinyl cutting, or sublimation, is right for you?
Mark Stephenson:
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, really we’re focused in on custom T’s as being the most common application for our customers and really 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’s, that you want to be able to operate in a small footprint, like you’re not going to rent a warehouse. Otherwise, you might make a different choice.
You also want to be able to do it in a home environment. I think that the next couple of points, you don’t have to worry about, some equipment you have to vent, some equipment, 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 backroom, they’re very flexible for T-shirt startups to be able to do almost anywhere.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Like an appliance. It’s like any appliance you would buy. Any appliance you buy, for the most part, you can feel comfortable just plugging in the wall and it’ll work in your house.
Mark Stephenson:
Right, exactly.
Marc Vila:
Right. Outside of a couple exceptions, I think.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. So the other things are, you want to make sure that it’s pretty easy to learn. And there’s complexities to any of these things. You’re going to have to learn something, none of this equipment is magic. You’ve got to get a design for both, you’ve got to send them to the output device, there are things that you have to learn and learn how to do, but these are relatively easy. You want something that’ll do more than just T-shirts maybe, or do different kinds of things on a T-shirt. And naturally, it’s got to be cheap. It’s got to be a small budget compared to most of the other ways to make sure it’s on the market.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, all those are great points. So if you’ve listened to that list and all that stuff checks off for you, then one of these two is a perfect system for you. Now, are there, quote, unquote, “better” ways to make a T-shirt? One could debatably say… I mean, it’s hard. This word better is hard, but are there ways you could produce more T-shirts faster? Yes. Are there ways that you can produce thousands of T-shirts in minutes or hours? Yes. Or are there ways you can customize things in a very, very unique way? Yeah. But that’s not what this is about. This is kind of those six or seven items that you mentioned, that’s your checklist. If this is your checklist, then you’re here. 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 listen to them all because there’s a ton to listen to.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, we actually did a two-part series on how much does it cost. So where we compared all the different T-shirt printing and customization methods, 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 choice between sublimation and heat transfer vinyl, which we’ll get to it, but it’s basically like a professional version of having a cricket for making T-shirts, because neither one of 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 and corresponding advantages.
And we’ll go through what they are for these two pieces of equipment, but 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 $50,000 on a UV printer and not be able to do fabric, or $30,000 on a high volume direct-to-film printer and not be able to apply anything to hard goods. 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, both of these do check those boxes like Marc said. You want to customize T-shirts, you want to go through all those bullet points. These definitely fit into that, you just might have to make a few trade offs as we go along.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, the way I look at these two pieces of equipment, and I’m going to make some cooking references throughout this podcast for one, because… Nice mug, by the way, if you’re watching the video.
Mark Stephenson:
Thank you.
Marc Vila:
Mark is about to smash a mug with a hammer. Oh my gosh.
Mark Stephenson:
He missed again.
Marc Vila:
So I’m going to 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. And folks, if you are going to move into your first apartment, which might be like starting 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 from Le Creuset. That’s probably not what you’re buying. You’re probably buying a nonstick pan. You’re probably buying a cast iron skillet, but you’re going to say, “Oh, but I can’t bake cupcakes in either of those two things.” No. Right. So later on you might get a cupcake pan, but a cupcake pan is not going to be your first buy. It’s just not versatile enough, all right? And…
Mark Stephenson:
But you’re going to run into it because somebody’s going to want you to make them cupcakes.
Marc Vila:
Somebody’s going to want you to make cupcakes. So I think that this is kind of, well, what’s your first pan? And then there’s the debate. Somebody will say, “Well, get a cast iron skillet.” Someone else will say, “I think you should get a non-stick Teflon type.” And then there’s the debate and that’s what this conversation is. This conversation’s about the debate of the two that are the number one starters out there for somebody looking to get into their first thing. So I think we’ll go right into the first one. And we’re going to talk about sublimation first, no particular order. It’s just how we wrote the notes.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. There you go. So, I mean, the first thing I want to get out of the way is sublimation is really sciencey.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Cool.
Mark Stephenson:
You know what I mean? There’s a lot that happens. Technically it’s called sublimation because the ink bonds to the shirt. There’s a process that it sublimate the design into the shirt, so that’s why printing is called sublimation. I don’t know why I started with that, but I just wanted to say the word sciencey.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Well, sublimation is a… Correct me, or don’t correct me because you can’t, because of the podcast. But I think it’s like a chemistry type of return. Normally what happens is matter moves through states and it moves from liquid, to solid, to gas, or I’m sorry, solid, to liquid, to gas, and vice versa, so those are the normal states of matter transformation, like water. Sublimation is kind of one of those scenarios where it skips that liquid state and it moves 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 gets sucked into whatever you’re decorating. That’s the sciencey kind of part of it.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. And I mean, the end result is you have something that can almost literally never wash off. It can’t, because you’ve basically dyed… Back in the olden times, they actually called it dye sublimation, because it basically dyes the material. But the process is just like any other transfer printer. 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 on top of a shirt, in a heat press, you hit the press down and presto, you have now created a custom T-shirt.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. I mean, 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 key chain, or a towel, or a hundred other things. So essentially it’s print, apply heat, give it to your customer, profit. I mean, 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.
Mark Stephenson:
You don’t have to know that.
Marc Vila:
Just to know that I’m printing on something and now I’m going to put it under a heat press and then I’ll have a finished good that I can sell.
So speaking of selling, what does it cost to buy something like this? What do we recommend?
Mark Stephenson:
It’s cheap. It’s cheap. As a matter of fact, Marc Vila, it’s one of the two cheapest things that you can do to make your custom T-shirt.
Marc Vila:
I did not know that until you said it.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, it’s true.
Marc Vila:
It sounds familiar.
Mark Stephenson:
It’s in the title somewhere. So basically it’s for the printer itself, it’s like 600 bucks. I mean, at the time of this podcast, because prices change over time, so we always want to qualify that. Right now, you can get the… Is it the Sawgrass SG500?
Marc Vila:
The Sawgrass SG500. And I think right now it’s about $625 to be a little more exact at the time of 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 from when you went to sleep to when you woke up.
Mark Stephenson:
Yes. Very true.
Marc Vila:
So we just have to say that just because we don’t know if this is going to be a $700 printer next month or a $500 printer. Prices are changing a lot, but I would safely assume around 600 bucks is probably going to be a good starting point for the printer and you can finance it, so-
Mark Stephenson:
Which is crazy to me, which is crazy.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. You can finance it. There’s some minimum requirements for financing and all that stuff, but you can finance something like this for under 100 bucks, under 50 bucks a month sometimes, depending on what you choose, and qualifications, and stuff. So cheap.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, I like that. And just like with the next one that we’re going to talk about, you need the printer itself, you need sublimation paper, and you need sublimation inks. So there’s usually a little bit of a bundle that happens in there. You want to add at least a box of paper and you want to add at least… Your starter ink set might be great, but you might want to pick up an extra set, just got to be a little flexible there.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. I mean, it’s basically the price of Netflix. Isn’t that about 50 bucks a month now? Are they, you know –
Mark Stephenson:
I really, I’m not going to say that out loud because then I have to look and I might have to –
Marc Vila:
It’s getting up there. So that’s the starting one. The next step up, which isn’t that much more, the SG1000 by Sawgrass, which… We’re not sponsored by Sawgrass. We are sponsored by…
Mark Stephenson:
We do sell the printers.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, but we’re sponsored by Coldesi and you can check out coldesi.com, but this is a printer that Coldesi sells and Coldesi is very particular about the brands and styles of printers that we sell.
Mark Stephenson:
Good point.
Marc Vila:
They have to be good. They have to be quality. We don’t want to support anything that’s going to break every two seconds because we’re not looking to constantly fix broken printers. We’re looking to help get you a printer and then help you be successful with it.
Mark Stephenson:
Yep, I agree.
Marc Vila:
But the SG1000 is the next step up. It’s bigger, bigger prints obviously has benefits you can imagine. Also, faster production, because if you’re doing little three-inch mug logos, you can print two, three times as many on a bigger sheet of paper, that automates the –
Mark Stephenson:
So it’s the SG600 prints on a standard piece of paper size, 8.5 by 11?
Marc Vila:
Yes.
Mark Stephenson:
And what does the 1000 do? Is that 11 by 17?
Marc Vila:
You could do up to 13 by 19 with a little add-on attachment that they have. So you could do 8.5 By 11, you could do 11 by 17, or 13 by 19.
Mark Stephenson:
Nice.
Marc Vila:
Which if you measure out 13 by 19 and draw it out and hold it up to your chest, you’ll see that that is a…
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, that’s way to do it.
Marc Vila:
It’s a huge, huge print for a T-shirt. Even the biggest guy on the football team will be happy with 13 by 19 size print. And…
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, so…
Marc Vila:
Go ahead.
Mark Stephenson:
I mean, that’s an early decision point because from my perspective, both of those things are cheap. The $600 is ridiculous and the $1,500 is still a very inexpensive way to produce the quality result that these printers do, so.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. And this is the hard part, and this is the conversation we have a lot that cheap, expensive are such relative…
Mark Stephenson:
Relative terms.
Marc Vila:
Relative terms. So somebody would look at a Tesla and say that it’s a pretty cheap car because they own half million dollar vehicles.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc Vila:
And on the flip side, if the most expensive car somebody’s ever owned is worth $3,000, a Tesla seems crazy.
Mark Stephenson:
And we have that conversation online in Facebook, and Instagram, TikTok, all the time, where we try to remember to publish the pricing for everything that we advertise in Coldesi and half the people will say, “Wow, that’s way too expensive.” And half the people will say, “Well, it sounds like a really good deal for what it does.”
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Well, here’s what I think really when it comes to cheap and expensive is how achievable is it for just about anybody to be able to buy it.
Mark Stephenson:
Okay. I like that.
Marc Vila:
So if something is worth $600 or $1,000 and you can finance it for less than 100 bucks a month, how quickly could the lowest paid person out there earn $100 dollars? One day. One day’s worth of work if you make a low wage, so that’s one day’s worth of work, of the span of your life, is not a lot of money. And that’s how I look at this stuff that both of these pieces of equipment are very achievable 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.
Mark Stephenson:
Yep. So I guess I just want to make the point, your first decision point, is 8.5 by 11 designs. Is that appropriate for what you want to 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.?
Marc Vila:
Yep. 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 Coldesi. Now, the other thing you need with sublimation is we did mention that you need to heat. You apply heat with sublimation. That’s how the transfer gets put onto your item, whether it’s a T-shirt or a mug. So you need a heat press machine. And heat press machine is going to be a couple hundred bucks to a couple thousand bucks.
Mark Stephenson:
Yep.
Marc Vila:
And you’ll be –
Mark Stephenson:
That’s almost a constant need. If you’re going to make custom T-shirts, you will need a heat press machine regardless of what piece of equipment you get.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. And just…
Mark Stephenson:
And so it’s…
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Well, just before, when we said you can finance it for fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty, two hundred a month, those packages usually include a heat press.
Mark Stephenson:
Yep.
Marc Vila:
At that price. So types of heat presses is just a little mini conversation, I think, to have here for those folks who don’t know. Do you want to tell us about some heat presses?
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. And really this applies to either technology, is when most people think about a heat press, they think about a standard kind of clamshell design. They’re square, or they’re rectangular, and they’re designed to put a shirt in, it’s flat, to press a transfer piece of paper down on it, or vinyl, or whatever you’ve got. But you can also get one that specializes in mugs, so 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 there’s also a cap press, which I highly recommend because I think custom caps are a great idea, but you can see again, if you’re going to heat press something on the front of a cap, you’re not going to be able to get that transfer to form around the cap using a flat heat press.
Especially if it’s a trucker’s cap, that’s got some dimension to it. You’re just going to destroy it. So you’ve got different heat press configurations, flat, cap, mug. There’s also less common ones for… There’s a ball press. There are heat presses that do a better job on koozies, maybe they’ve got attachments for koozies. There’s just plates. Once you get into this world of customizing different things, there’s a wide variety of heat presses you can use and that you can add to your business. However, 99% of them are flat. 99% of the heat press is bundled with either one of these printers or just a standard flat heat press.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, it’s going to be your most versatile, because we say T-shirts, but T-shirts also means any apparel, sweater, shorts, sweatpants, onesies.
Mark Stephenson:
Flat things.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. Headbands, anything that you could press flat. And then that’s all other flat things. So we sell picture frames, photo frames for the wall. You can print… If you’re watching the video, Mark has a cool painting from Tampa in his background of the video. And if you had that digital file, you can print up to a 13 by 19 of that and then sublimate it onto a very specific material that’s designed to create a very elegant wall hanging.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, metal class.
Marc Vila:
And then you created a sign. A friend of mine has a business that that’s only what they do. That’s literally what they do is they print on sign materials with sublimation. So you decide what kind of heat press you need and your printer. So relatively speaking, you’re going to start this somewhere in the $600 range if you already own some stuff, up to a couple thousand dollars range, and you can go even higher with bigger and more stuff, but you can get this whole thing financed for $100, $200, $300 a month or even less.
Mark Stephenson:
So would you say, I mean, just to kind of nail things down, if you got the SG500 and an inexpensive 15-inch heat press, you could get out for $1,000?
Marc Vila:
You could get out…
Mark Stephenson:
1,100 bucks?
Marc Vila:
I would say $1,500 is kind of the realistic number that I would push for.
Mark Stephenson:
Okay.
Marc Vila:
Because that is also going to get you some other things that we talk about in other podcasts, but 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 going to make and maybe…
Mark Stephenson:
Right. Or blank T-shirts.
Marc Vila:
Or T-shirts, or stuff like that. You’re going to buy some things to practice and learn on. You’re going to make mistakes. Mother’s days coming up, so you’re just going to make a handful of mother’s mugs, just for practicing and maybe give them to your mothers. I don’t know how many you have, but six.
Mark Stephenson:
We’re not going to judge. I mean, maybe you do.
Marc Vila:
And so you’re going to want some practice stuff. You’re going to buy, like Mark mentioned, some paper. There might be some accessories you think about. There is actually one thing, Mark, is 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.
Mark Stephenson:
That’s right. I remember those.
Marc Vila:
And put your oven at home and actually make mugs in your oven using a specialty kind of silicone wrap. So you might say, “I want one of those wraps 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.” You may also want to get some heat gloves because you’re working with a bunch of hot stuff. So I say 1,500 bucks is a pretty good number on the low end to get started realistically.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. And that’s really what we want, because a lot of times you’ll see advertisements and we do it too because you can just buy the printer.
Marc Vila:
Yeah.
Mark Stephenson:
And we try to convince you in as many ways as we can that you never just want to buy the printer. So realistically, you spend 1,500 bucks, you’re off to the races.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. I mean, you’re legit starting your business for that price.
Mark Stephenson:
Okay. So let’s talk about pros and cons then for sublimation.
Marc Vila:
Pros and cons. So pro, I’ll start with some pros.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.
Marc Vila:
It’s just super versatile.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.
Marc Vila:
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 colmanandcompany.com. C-O-L-M-A-N and company.com, if you go to the menu all the way on the side, you’ll see wholesale blanks and there’s sections just for sublimation stuff. You’re going to just shop and you be like.
Mark Stephenson:
It’s crazy.
Marc Vila:
Another one, and another one and another… There’s tons of them.
Mark Stephenson:
And there’s some great videos too on what that stuff can look like.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, there’s tons of videos and how to do it, instructions, everything, so it’s very versatile. It’s pretty easy to use. If you go through the training and you practice a little bit, I mean, you’re going to be able to make mugs that people will want to buy right away.
Mark Stephenson:
And I got to 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, or order an inkjet printer on Amazon and try to convert it, we use Sawgrass because they work really well, but also because they have a really good training program. So normally we have to develop one for the equipment that we sell, Sawgrass was an exception, so you can get great training.
Marc Vila:
One of the folks on the phones at Coldesi that will help out with sublimation, him and I believe his brother, if I recall, they bought, they have one of those, they took a printer where they converted it to sublimation. And I asked him one day, I said, “Hey,” because we don’t make stuff at Coldesi, we sell the equipment. I said, “Hey, I actually want to get a bunch of stuff made. You do that, right?” And he is like, “You’re not going to get the quality that we make here at Coldesi with the Frankenstein machine that I had.” He is like, “It’s different, so is that what you want?” Because I had mentioned that I was looking for something really high quality, so these are super high quality, top of the line type of prints you’re going to get.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.
Marc Vila:
Okay, but it’s pretty easy to use and learn. It feels and washes great in general. And looks great.
Mark Stephenson:
I’m just going to say nothing feels like it’s not there. Sublimation feels like it’s not there.
Marc Vila:
Yeah.
Mark Stephenson:
Right?
Marc Vila:
Yes.
Mark Stephenson:
Because it becomes part of the item. It’s not an additive, it’s part of it now.
Marc Vila:
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 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’s trapped in there.
Mark Stephenson:
It’s like the Venus flytrap of apparel decoration. How’s that?
Marc Vila:
It very much is, except I don’t think you could see the fly inside it, but if it was clear… We should move on.
Mark Stephenson:
Okay, let’s do that. So it’s also something that definitely works. It’s not new, it is a proven technology, it’s something that works all the time, it works very consistently. It’s a good, solid, professional and yet inexpensive application.
Marc Vila:
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 have been using them all over the place, all over the world, globally for producing. I would say there’s probably 100% chance you own or have owned something that was produced on one of those printers.
Mark Stephenson:
Oh, yeah. I imagine so. Especially if you fish. Anything to do with fishing, that seems to be big…
Marc Vila:
Anything to do with fishing.
Mark Stephenson:
Everybody sublimates fishing.
Marc Vila:
A lot of mugs, a lot of T-shirts, a lot of decorative things you could have bought for your house or seen in a business. One of our customers I know, mentioned that he made the signs for inside of a 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, which is cool. And then the last pro is that there’s just so many blanks and options that we mentioned earlier. Luggage tags, and coasters, and gaming mouse pads. There’s so many things you could decorate with sublimation that once you get some customers and you could start to sell to them, there’s tons of accessories you can add on to your orders or help them with next time they want something customized.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, that’s great. And both of these that we’re going to talk about is also a great add-on for anything else you might own for the same thing. So I guess that leaves the cons to me.
Marc Vila:
Sure.
Mark Stephenson:
Since you did the pros. So sublimation is an ink process. It’s like a better version of your ancient printer at home. And whenever you have liquid inks, you’ve got to think about things involving liquid inks, which include, 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 occasionally you do have to clean, you can’t store your liquid inks or your paper in the garage, if it’s too humid or if it gets down below zero, or something like that, you do have to be careful about storing that kind of thing. 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, but if you start drifting into things like 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 the cotton, so it’s not going to stay there. 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 a 100% polyester, especially if the shirt is designed for sublimation, like vapor apparel, that Colman and Company carries, it’s amazing. But if you start running along the edges of whether or not it’s 100%, or it’s not really polyester, it’s some other synthetic blend, then you’re in a little bit of trouble.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. And one comment on that is that that con it can be a pro too, which is interesting because 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.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.
Marc Vila:
Is you will need to buy, you’re going to buy them from a wholesaler as a blank. And that does give you the opportunity to buy them at a wholesale price and mark up the blank and the print kind of all in one, where embroidery can go on anything. And some customers, some businesses, I talked to a lady the other day, actually. Everybody has to bring something to her for her embroidery.
Mark Stephenson:
It’s crazy.
Marc Vila:
And she loses out on some of the blanks, but she’s just not interested in that. That’s her business. 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, “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 it does allow you to control what you’re selling a little bit more because the customer can do it anyway.
Mark Stephenson:
That’s a good spin. I’m still going to leave it in the con category, but that’s a really good spin.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, it’s less convenient than being able to use anything.
Mark Stephenson:
Yes. So also it only works on light colored items. So the way color works is that if you imagine, if you’ve got a dark gray wall in your house and you want to paint it a light blue, or a yellow, or something like that, 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 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 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.
Marc Vila:
This is why…
Mark Stephenson:
So there’s no white ink. So again, in my eyes, it’s another limitation.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. And it reminds me of painting. You mentioned painting, like painting on a wall. If you were to purchase a house and all the walls were black, and you wanted to repaint them, as you were mentioning, typically if you go to the paint store, they’re going to tell you to prime the wall first. Even if you have paint and primer in one, that black paint…
Mark Stephenson:
Not going to make it. Trust me.
Marc Vila:
It’s not going to make it, so use primer. And primer is white because then the next color you put on top of it is going to really pop out. The other examples I give you, if you spill spaghetti sauce on a white T-shirt, you can really see it. If you spill it on the black T-shirt, it kind of hides. And that would be the same thing. You put a red sublimation on a black T-shirt, you’re barely going to see it, just like that spaghetti sauce thing.
Mark Stephenson:
Marc Vila was eyeballing my black polo just specifically for that reason, because it just got back from lunch. So another one is that heat press has to be hot, so you’ve got to heat your heat press up to about 400 degrees to do a sublimation transfer print. And that is going to sit in your back office. It’s going to sit in your home. It’s going to sit in that mall kiosk. And if you’re doing large runs, you will be sticking your head in and out of the oven all day. Does that make sense?
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s hot. It’s like working in a kitchen. You’re going to be around a 400-degree oven, so it’s going to be hot and you’ll feel it because you have to work around and near the heat, just like in a kitchen.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. And I do want to point out that in a lot of cheaper heat presses, like if you got a craft press off Amazon or something like that, they’re a clamshell design, which means that, I’m doing a motion. So it means it hinges open like the hood of a car or your trunk.
Marc Vila:
Or a clam.
Mark Stephenson:
Or a clam, so just like that. And you’re going to be putting your hands in there, you’re going to be threading the shirt on the platinum, or 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 Marc Vila mentioned were the heat gloves, specifically so that doesn’t happen.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. And just since you’re talking about heat presses, I mean, a good heat press is paramount to your success. Cheap heat presses or craft heat presses are not meant for commercial. They’re usually really slow. Some of those really low temperature heat presses, it takes five minutes to make something in there, when you’re done in 30 seconds or a minute with something commercial-grade. And it’s also designed to stay on all day and do production runs, compared to craft stuff is not really… It’s going to say on the box, “Not meant for commercial use.” So don’t buy that for your business. There’s a good reason why that’s there.
Mark Stephenson:
Okay.
Marc Vila:
And the last thing.
Mark Stephenson:
I think we’ve beat up sublimation enough.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, the last little bit though, is that because it requires heat, that does mean you can’t put it on anything that you can’t get hot or you can’t fit in a heat press.
Mark Stephenson:
Good point.
Marc Vila:
So you can’t do body art or a car window.
Mark Stephenson:
I mean, you could.
Marc Vila:
Yeah.
Mark Stephenson:
It’s going to suck.
Marc Vila:
Yeah.
Mark Stephenson:
It’s going to be terrible.
Marc Vila:
Well, so there you go. There’s a good amount about sublimation and now we can move on to vinyl.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.
Marc Vila:
The other contender. So what’s vinyl cutting?
Mark Stephenson:
I mean, you do it all the time, Marc Vila. This is like your… We talk about it in the office all the time, how much Marc likes and gets great use out of the graph tech cutter, the Cut n Press system that we’ve got in showroom too, at the Coldesi showroom.
Marc Vila:
I do vinyl cutting a lot. I think it’s cool. I think it’s great. I love sublimation too, but I was doing vinyl cutting before I was doing sublimation work. So this is a process where you take a rolled material, vinyl, it’s usually some sort of a polyurethane or a PDC type of material for the sciencey out there. And on the back of that material, there is either a heat-applied glue or a pressure sensitive type of glue. So basically a sticker or heat transfer, depending the material that you buy. And I kind of think this is another cooking reference. It’s like making Christmas cookies. 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, 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 what’s happening…
Mark Stephenson:
That’s a great analogy. I like that.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. The vinyl comes in a roll. You don’t have to roll it out yourself, which is nice. It comes in a roll. You put it in a cutting machine, it will cut out your shapes, you pull out everything that you don’t want, so you’re just left with just the shapes. And then those shapes go on a T-shirt, or a mug, or a tumbler, or a sign, or something like that.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I think that it you’ve got to see the video of making a shirt. If you’ve never seen somebody use like a cricket is a vinyl cutter, for example. If you’ve never seen somebody use one or one of the professional versions like we sell, then you really do have to see a video. It used to be called a cutting plotter because what you’re doing really is you’re creating a design in your computer and then it traces out the design on the vinyl with the razor blade. And that’s what makes the cuts and that’s what provides the weed, so the razor blade is the cookie cutter itself. It’s just kind of tracing the design instead of with a pencil, instead of with a pencil, like a plotter, it’s cutting. And that’s what gives you the material to peel.
Marc Vila:
Yep. And then you could do whatever you want with that that you cut. So we’ll talk about the same order cost to getting started on that. It’s pretty darn close. One of the cutters we recommend is the Graphtec CE7000 and you can see it on colmanandcompany.com. And that’s around $1,300. And same thing, you can finance a package with that cutter for $50 to %150 a month or something like that-ish, in that range. And there’s some larger ones too, that get closer to $2,000. And then there’s even a cutter that will print too. And we could talk about that a little bit.
Mark Stephenson:
That’s a good point.
Marc Vila:
The Roland BN-20A. And that’s getting a little more expensive. That’s not following into the cheapest range. It’s about $6,000 or a couple hundred bucks a month just for that printer. But that’s your range kind of cutters right there. Pretty close to the same price. You can get started maybe a little bit more, I think. I think you’re probably a little closer to $2,000-ish.
Mark Stephenson:
Okay. That’s that’s with the cutter itself, the vinyl supplies, a decent heat press, etc.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. A couple roles of vinyl to get you started, some practice shirts if you want to do a small heat press. Now, of course, that can go up to $3,000 or $4,000 depending on what accessories you want to buy. There’s tons of accessories, but you can get started for a couple thousand bucks and be kind of ready to go.
Mark Stephenson:
So I think I want to make a couple of differentiations here because 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, you have the opportunity to use a roll. And how big are the rolls generally, Marc?
Marc Vila:
So you could buy… The typical size for a compact size roll is going to be about 15 inches wide and about 5 yards long.
Mark Stephenson:
Okay. 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 larger designs and longer designs, you can do more smaller ones. So it really does kind of accelerate. There’s very little comparison between the $300 craft cutter and the performance on this Graphtec entry level cutter. They’re completely different as far as…
Marc Vila:
If you wanted to move a few bags of concrete, just a different kind of random example, but I saw this the other day. If you had a little golf cart, you could put a couple bags of concrete on there and you could drive it a mile down the road and you can transport your concrete. 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.
Mark Stephenson:
That’s great.
Marc Vila:
It’s back and forth, your battery’s going to die a ton of times before the job’s even done. And you’re just wasting time. And then the golf cart’s going to die way sooner than its normal life, because you’re dropping 500 pounds of concrete on it 20 times a day. That’s kind of like operating a cricket or a silhouette, a hobby machine that you can buy from a hobby store to do a business. It’s not designed for that.
Mark Stephenson:
And now, I’ll also say. Yeah, on the other end, this 15-inch cutter that we sell a bunch of, and it’s great. It’s the one we have in the showroom, is at the entry-level point for commercial cutters. It’s at the entry level. It is a professional machine, performs beautifully, but they get much bigger. I mean, what’s the next level up, is 24 inches?
Marc Vila:
Oh, yeah. 24 inch, the CE7000-60.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.
Marc Vila:
And then there’s a -120, and then there’s rolling cutters as well. And then there’s the print and cut machines. And then they get really, really big if your business grows where they fit. They’re the size of a room, of a large room.
Mark Stephenson:
Yes.
Marc Vila:
But I think it is important because that’s a common thing with cutters as someone says, “Well, why would I buy a $1,300 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?” It just doesn’t make sense to do that. Now, they could do one job with a golf cart and they could even do some little jobs with it, but as soon as they get a pickup truck and they’re like, “Dang, one trip to home Depot to do a job? It’s mind-blowing. And that’s kind of what this is, you could print or cut, all of your T-shirts in one click of a button super fast, 10 times faster than a hobby or machine, 10 times cheaper for the materials than a hobby machine, and you’re actually doing efficient business. And then it’s not going to break down on you. No, it’s not going to break down because it’s designed to be run and used like a commercial piece of machine is designed for.
Mark Stephenson:
There you go. So how about if I do the pros this time?
Marc Vila:
Okay.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.
Marc Vila:
Now, before we jump into those, there’s one comment about buying a kit. It’s not in pro, con yet, but it kind of is, is you actually don’t always need a heat press when you’re cutting. 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, 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 $1,500, you’re ready to start right away, almost on both of them, especially on the cutter side, if you don’t need a heat press.
Mark Stephenson:
Right. But you will need a heat press if you want to do T-shirts.
Marc Vila:
If you want to do T-shirts, you will. Right. So let’s go into pros. Tell us.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.
Marc Vila:
What’s the good stuff?
Mark Stephenson:
Okay. So I love these things, because like a sublimation printer, they’re super versatile, 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 a single color, the vinyl is everywhere. Heat transfer vinyl is everywhere because you can do so many things with it. Like Marc Vila said, you can create signs, we’ve got signs in our building that a local sign shop did for us using a vinyl cutter. You can use 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 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.
Marc Vila:
Yep.
Mark Stephenson:
It’s also pretty easy to learn. I think one of the sleeper advantages is to the Graphtec line, if you’re using these roles of vinyl, like we’re talking about, is 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… Once you get into 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? Does the color change when I heat press it? There’s a lot that goes in. And are you doing Photoshop? Are you doing retouching of the graphic before you print it? And with the cutter, it is really just a series of outlines. And you are changing the color, you are deciding whether it’s glitter or a different texture, maybe it’s mermaid or whatever the special, maybe it’s leopard print. Whatever 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. It also, depending on the vinyl, it feels amazing. And I’m going to plug Triton and Marc Vila here because it took more than a year, I think, for us to develop Triton vinyl, working with the factory, trying to pick just the right color set and how thick it is, and how easily it weeds, and how long it takes to press, and the colors that are available. It took us a long time to do that and the results are outstanding.
So I would put, and it’s no more expensive than other brands on the market, if you use Triton vinyl, it feels amazing and it will basically last as long as a shirt. It’s also something else that’s another proven technology. You’re not reinventing the wheel, you’re not discovering anything new. There have been cutters around since I was a kid and I’m 112 years old.
Marc Vila:
There you go.
Mark Stephenson:
So it’s been around for a long time. It almost… Does it really matter what kind of a blank you put it on? If it’s apparel?
Marc Vila:
I mean, almost not. Almost not. Yeah.
Mark Stephenson:
If it’ll last through a heat press, then it doesn’t matter.
Marc Vila:
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 could buy, you could put heat transfer vinyl on, which is cool.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. And you can do stickers, which is terrific and super popular, but also people get so creative with things like mirror vinyl, and glitter vinyl, and flock, which it has kind of a fabricy feel, which is kind of cool. 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 really let your creativity come through. And you can definitely see that in some of the designs that we’ve done for our videos, especially with mixed media, but we’ve got a trucker cap one, where we did a glitter red heart on a truck, on a cap. And then the rest of it was just a regular heat transfer vinyl. It looks terrific. So definitely that versatility, along with the price and the customer satisfaction that comes when you deliver heat transfer vinyl good, is great.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Well, cutters like these are used by every large apparel manufacturer out there. If you get a Nike shirt, there’s swoops that were cut with a cutter, so that is really great. It’s something really high quality, but there are some cons. We got to talk about them because this is a pro-con thing. So one of the big cons is 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. But with vinyl, you’re going to do one color at a time. So if you have a three color logo, you’re going to cut color one, cut color two, cut color three, heat press color one, heat press color two, heat press color three.
It can be a little time consuming. And depending on the design, 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 one color is always faster on vinyl or one color is always faster on sublimation, but it is more time consuming, period, 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.
Mark Stephenson:
That’s a good point.
Marc Vila:
Now, because it is one color out of a time, that means every color you have, you have a role 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, it lasts a super long time, but it’s still inventory you have to carry. 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.
Mark Stephenson:
So I just want to specify, you don’t mean you can’t print on puppies or babies, you can’t print pictures of puppies or babies.
Marc Vila:
Both.
Mark Stephenson:
Both. Okay. You can’t do either one.
Marc Vila:
Yes.
Mark Stephenson:
Okay.
Marc Vila:
Yes, you cannot do either one of those.
Mark Stephenson:
Good.
Marc Vila:
After I finish my cons, I’ll tell you about how you can potentially print on a child though. Trust me.
Mark Stephenson:
Because you’ve done it. I know. I know.
Marc Vila:
Okay. And then, 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 McDonald’s logo. It’s an M, two arches. Cutting that in vinyl’s going to take like five seconds literally for a full size shirt. Cut out an M and then you peel it, and then… And so cutting is super simple. Weeding it, when you pull out the excess is simple. It’s one pull off, because it’s just an M. Now, your local state seal, cause 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.
Mark Stephenson:
There’s wheat. No one knows why.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, I don’t know why.
Mark Stephenson:
There’s a bird.
Marc Vila:
But there’s a bird, usually, there’s some sort of animal 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 all the little pieces and parts to get your design. It’s going to take a long time to do. Sometimes really long, so long that you’re going to refuse to do it, because then you can’t sell it.
Mark Stephenson:
If you’re smart.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, if you’re smart, because it could take you a half hour or 30 minutes just to make one shirt, where if it was digitally printed on sublimation, it’d be done in seconds. So that is a con, is that you get to a level of complication where you just don’t do it, you have to offer your customer alternatives.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. And I just want to point out, like Marc Vila is wearing the Coldesi logo on his shirt, which you could definitely do in vinyl.
Marc Vila:
There you go. Yep.
Mark Stephenson:
But even the O and the E, you would have to stop and pick out the centers, where on sublimation, you would not.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. So I think this is… Yeah.
Mark Stephenson:
And that’s just like a really small example.
Marc Vila:
And I think this is a good example. If I needed to do a dozen of these, sublimation is going to be much faster, even though it’s not that complicated, just because we’ve got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 colors, 6 actually, because there’s a little gray line. Six colors and a bunch of little details, it’s just going to take much longer. 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 promised that. But an interesting thing is you can buy a glue, and glitter, and things like that are like makeup, they’re designed for skin application. And you can buy sticker materials that are safe for that too, which means literally you can print out a stencil and you can stick it on to somebody’s arm and then you can paint on it 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 decorations on people.
Mark Stephenson:
Wow.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. So I’ve cut out a bunch of vinyl and bought that stuff off the internet and gone to my kid’s birthday party and did glitter tattoos for all little kids.
Mark Stephenson:
Cool.
Marc Vila:
And then one of the friends said, “Can you bring that when my party next week?” So I got a gig right away.
Mark Stephenson:
Well, you got a gig out of it.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. I got a gig.
Mark Stephenson:
And then you broke the news that those tattoos are permanent. You were just kidding about that.
Marc Vila:
I’m sorry, but.
Mark Stephenson:
Always going to have that.
Marc Vila:
Bad decision at five years old, buddy. So we can wrap it up. I think we did great here. My kind of thought is both of these systems are really great. And when we talked earlier about your first apartment and what are you going to get for your first cooking pan, if you decided for the non-stick or you decided for the stainless steel, or the cast iron, they’re all great decisions. And you’re going to want to own one of those throughout cooking your whole life. And I feel this way about both of these. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been in business for 20 years or your first day, having a sublimation printer or a cutter is a great tool for the business. You can always use it, it’s always great for doing a quick job, or a cheap job, or sometimes an expensive, complicated job. They’re just great tools and realistically, it’s not a bad decision no matter which way you go. You just pick one that’s kind of right.
Mark Stephenson:
Or to buy both.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, that’s helpful.
Mark Stephenson:
I mean, that’s also another… You know what I mean? If you were surprised at how inexpensive the two cheapest ways to make a custom T-shirt that we would recommend are, then maybe both are for you, because you can use the same heat press for both. So you are getting a little economy that way, so maybe you could get into both systems for $3,000 and now that’s going to be $60 a month or %100 dollars a month, or something along those lines. So think about that too. And if you are an embroider that decided to listen to this, or you’ve got a screen print shop, or even just ended up with one of our high volume direct-to-film printers and wondering what you’re going to do with that guy standing out front that just wants one shirt in the next 20 minutes, then maybe adding one or both these to your busy shop is a good idea too.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that by the end of this episode, hopefully you learned some stuff. Maybe you’re more confused because you thought you had your decision made. Maybe not, but if you go to coldesi.com or go to colmanandcompany.com as well, colmanandcompany.com is going to have, you’re going to see all the supplies on there too. So you’re going to see all your shirts, and hats, and your ink, and vinyl, and all those supplies on there too, so you can check it all out. But if you live chat or call in and talk to the pros there, they’ll help to walk you through some of this stuff to help you make a recommendation. And they’ll help you define the limitations and also just explain your business, because oftentimes folks will talk to our pros and they’ll have an idea.
And by the time they talk to the pro, the pro will kind of on the phone say, “I hear that a lot, but let me tell you a little truth about that, or a little secret about that, or something that actually here’s a way easier way to do it, that you can make more money.” And they can help to walk you through that and understand it. So I think that’s a great next step if you’re not sure exactly what to do or if you’re ready to buy, call them up, of course.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, that’s great.
All right. Thanks for listening, everyone. This has been Mark Stephenson from Coldesi.
Marc Vila:
And Marc Vila from Coldesi and colmanandcompany.com
Mark Stephenson:
Love it. Have a great business.