Most shops price screen printing by feel, then wonder why the busy months are not the profitable ones. The fix is not a bigger markup. It is separating the three costs that behave completely differently as quantity changes.
The three costs
Blank cost scales linearly. 100 tees cost 100 times one tee, less whatever supplier break you hit.
Decoration cost scales linearly too, but it is driven by impressions, not by how the art looks. One position, two colours, plus an underbase, is three impressions per garment. Your press runs at a certain number of impressions per hour whatever the design is.
Setup cost does not scale at all. Separations, screen making, exposure, registration, ink mixing and a test print cost the same for 12 shirts as for 500. This is the number that decides whether small runs make money.
The formula
unit price = (blank + (impressions x cost per impression) + (setup / quantity)) x markup
Everything hard about pricing is working out your real cost per impression and your real setup cost. Both are knowable in an afternoon.
Cost per impression
Take last month. Total press-related cost (operator wages, ink, a share of rent and power, press maintenance) divided by total impressions run. Most small shops land somewhere between 8p and 20p per impression. Use your own number, not a number from a forum.
Setup cost
Time your own process once: separations, coating, exposure, washout, taping, registration, ink mix, test prints, teardown, reclaim. Multiply by your loaded labour rate and add consumables. Per screen. Shops that measure this for the first time are usually surprised, and it is almost always higher than what they had been charging.
Worked example: 100 black tees, 2 colours, 1 position
Two spot colours on a dark garment means an underbase, so three impressions per shirt.
| Line | Calculation | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Blanks | 100 x £2.40 | £240.00 |
| Impressions | 100 x 3 x £0.12 | £36.00 |
| Screen setup | 3 screens x £18 | £54.00 |
| Fully loaded cost | £330.00 | |
| Cost per shirt | £330 / 100 | £3.30 |
| Price at 2.2x markup | £7.26 | |
| Sell at | £7.50 | |
| Order value | £750.00 | |
| Gross margin | 56% |
Now change one thing: 24 shirts instead of 100.
| Line | Calculation | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Blanks | 24 x £2.40 | £57.60 |
| Impressions | 24 x 3 x £0.12 | £8.64 |
| Screen setup | 3 screens x £18 | £54.00 |
| Fully loaded cost | £120.24 | |
| Cost per shirt | £5.01 | |
| Price at 2.2x markup | £11.02 |
The setup is 45 percent of the cost of the small job and 16 percent of the large one. That is the entire reason quantity breaks exist. If you quote the 24-piece job at the 100-piece price, you are not being generous, you are working for nothing.
Where shops lose the money
Forgetting the underbase. Two colours on black is three impressions, not two. Quote it as two and you have given away a third of your press time.
Not charging for the second position. A back print is a second setup and a second run through the press. It is not a small addition to the front.
Absorbing artwork time. Separations on a badly supplied file can take an hour. Charge an art fee, or ask for print-ready art, but do not eat it silently. See what to send your digitiser for the embroidery equivalent, and the glossary if separations, underbase or halftones need unpacking.
Quantity breaks on round numbers. Your breaks should follow your setup cost, not 12 / 24 / 48 out of habit. Work out the quantity at which setup drops below 20 percent of cost and put a break there.
Do it once, then never do the arithmetic again
This is a price matrix, and it does not change often: blank cost, cost per impression, setup per screen, markup, break points. Once it exists, quoting is lookup rather than mental arithmetic, and it stays consistent whoever is at the counter.
That is exactly what a quoting tool is for: garment cost, decoration cost, setup and margin on the quote line where you can see them, with the price recalculating as the quantity moves. If your quotes currently live in a spreadsheet, the cost of staying manual is mostly this: the arithmetic gets done differently every time.
Charge for the time, not the guess at the time
The formula above prices the press. It does not price the twenty minutes someone spent re-drawing a logo from a photo, the second registration after a customer changed the placement, or the hour lost to a pallet adhesive problem. Those hours are real, they land on specific jobs, and if you do not capture them, your quoted margin will always be flattering.
There are only two honest ways to handle job labour. Estimate it from a measured standard, or measure it. A measured standard works when your jobs look alike: 100 tees, one position, two colours is the same job every time, so a standard of 55 minutes is close enough. Measurement is the only thing that works when your mix is wide, which for most shops it is.
Measuring means staff clock on to a job when they start it and off when they stop. That gives you three things a spreadsheet cannot:
- Real labour cost per job, at each person's own rate, so a job run by your fastest printer and a job run by your newest starter cost different amounts, because they did.
- Margin after labour, which is the only margin figure that answers whether a job was worth taking. Gross margin flatters anything that ate press time.
- A ranked list of your labour-heavy jobs, which is your requoting list for next season.
What the numbers usually reveal
Shops that start measuring labour tend to find the same three things within a month.
Small multi-position jobs are worse than they look. A 24-piece job with a front and a back is two setups and two runs. On paper it carries a healthy percentage. Add the flash cure, the reclaim and the second registration and the hour-per-shirt figure is often worse than the 200-piece job you thought was thin.
Rush jobs eat more than the rush fee covers. Not because the job is slower, but because it interrupts. The changeover you did not plan costs press time on both sides of it. See setting rush fees for how to price that properly.
One customer is usually carrying a hidden discount. Not in price: in artwork time, in placement changes, in reprints absorbed to keep the peace. It shows up as a gap between quoted and realised margin on that account and nowhere else.
Put the numbers where the quote is
A price matrix that lives in a spreadsheet drifts, because the person quoting on a busy Friday does the arithmetic differently from the person who built it. The fix is not discipline, it is putting the matrix behind the quote form.
Printer's Friend prices per decoration method, snapshots the garment and decoration cost onto every quote line, and adds clocked labour on top, so the job costing report shows gross margin and margin after labour side by side, by day, by method and by customer. The commission side works the same way: the rep's rate is frozen onto the order when they are assigned, and it pays out on the ex-tax value when the job ships, so nobody earns on a quote that never happened.
A quick sanity test on any quote
Before it goes out, three questions. What are the impressions, counted honestly including the underbase? What is the setup, per screen, at your real measured cost? And how many hours of shop time does this job consume, at your real labour rate? If the answer to the third is a shrug, the quote is a guess with a decimal point in it.
Once the formula holds, look at your minimum order quantity next. It is the same maths pointed at the question of which jobs to accept at all.