Screen Printing NYC T-Shirts: Retail Stores

If you are a screen printer, or looking to enter into the screen printing industry, a good place to start off is with Retail Stores. The reason I say this is because retail stores, if they are successful, order many SKUs and constantly order. It can be once a week five different t-shirt designs and 144 pieces of each, or can be once a month 5 SKUs and 1,000 pieces of each. Either way, I don’t have to tell you that it is a great business and retail stores are great customers. There are some upsides and some downsides when selling to retail stores though.

When you are selling t-shirts, or even other apparel to retail stores you might come across some obstacles along the process. To start, if the store is part of a chain and has many stores in the chain you will be facing the pricing problem. You might regularly sell a t-shirt with a single color print for $5-$7 and now they want is for $4-$5 per shirt. With a price cut like that one must think twice if they really want to cut into that market. Another obstacle might be production time on order. Larger companies and chain stores usually put a cancel day on the purchase orders, where if the goods are not shipped by this date don’t ship them at all! You might normally take 7-10 days to complete and order for your customers, now they tell you they need their PO’s completed within 5-6 days. In addition to price cut and turn around time, you will sometimes get the customer who wants his goods packed and shipped a certain way, a way that is way different than you are currently shipping orders. They can tell you that they want the order split into 10 cases for example and each case will have 24 t-shirts in a certain size breakdown. They might also want you to apply their shipping label on the outside of each carton in order for their receiving process to become more streamline. These are all reasons why screen printers might have to think twice about working with larger chains and retail stores.

On the other hand, you will be getting LOTS of orders and these order will be consistent. It might be that on your slow months, typically it is slow for screen printers between December and February, might turn into your best months. Remember, stores do not work on the same schedule as schools and organizations do, so where schools are off for winter break in December, a store might need to place order with you in order to have their t-shirts in stock for the holiday season. Some retail stores might start out ordering small and might explode into ordering larger amounts after just a few years in business, like Nothing Too Fancy. Another upside to working with retail stores might be an opportunity to put your brand onto the market. You might have a brand that you are trying to sell or promote, but it is impossible to find customers who would buy it. Let the retail do the work of getting the customer, while you take on the job of getting the t-shirts printed.

Here is a little something we are currently screen printing for a retail store in Manhattan New York. It’s a pretty simple and elegant design that is now being displayed in front of millions of people and is constantly being reordered by the retailer. Our screen printing company in NYC has a great design staff and a wonderful team to print the merchandise. We invite you to reach out to us if you are in the retail industry, or just want to get shirts into your store.