Images_Digital_Edition_July_2019

www.images-magazine.com 26 images JULY 2019 T he best way for a decorator to maximise their DTG operation in terms of profitability is to first truly understand the total cost of ownership of their system. Whether they purchase entry-level machines for tens of thousands or for hundreds of thousands of pounds, they need to assess their consumable usage and, above all, the uptime of their respective system. The decorator must assess the output over an extended period to find the sweet spot for pricing accurately. The sweet spot is when the quantity hits a number where the set-up of colours Rich Thompson, CEO of Aeoon North America, offers advice on setting the right price for your DTG services Rich Thompson on a screen press would take longer than producing the job – typically four colours and above. This varies depending on the machine because it is based on cost per print and speed of printing. For example, our Kyo 12-3 can do 140 full-colour full-chest prints per hour. If an order comes in for a four-to-six colour job, it would take a screen printer one hour to one hour and thirty minutes to set up, so if the order is under 200 shirts it would make more sense to do it digitally. The same doesn’t necessarily hold true for other DTG machines out there. Our closest competitor’s comparable unit in price offers approximately 65 prints per hour of the same size and scope. So, in the same scenario it would make more sense for the screen printer to set up for a 200-piece, four-to-six colour order and only run DTG for 100 shirts and below. B2B versus B2C The screen printing pricing model has always been based first on colour – one, two, three or four – and then quantity. With DTG, colour no longer needs to be an inhibitor, but instead something to differentiate and offer as a value-added service for a minimal upcharge. So, the ten-thousand-dollar question is, how to price DTG services accordingly? The answer is it depends on your target market. For contract decorators, pricing DTG will be a little more difficult because the market served is the mature ‘colour/quantity’ business-to-business market. There is an opportunity to make considerably more margin by training your customer base to simply ask for quantity and take colour out of the equation, which will make it naturally increase. Graphic designers will then be able to push a design in terms of creativity and colour and leave the black and white days behind them. It is then incumbent on the decorator not to leave money on the table and price accordingly. In many cases, full-colour DTG prints have been priced in the area of six-to-eight colour screen print jobs at quantities of multiple cases of shirts. This is because DTG is still a new and growing market and the early adapters didn’t price it based on what the market would accept, but rather at the same rate as their highest decorating prices. This goes back to the B2B market maturity and decorators not being able to successfully change the thought process of the promotional goods distributors. On the business-to-consumer (B2C) side, they had retail to help set the prices at a much higher