Is doing one off T/Polo Shirts worth it?

[logobear]

Don't take your eye off the ball !
you want jobs of 10-20 polos, not one-offs!
We do one-offs for £15 to £20 each, and do several a day, price for 20 is about half that.
First one of any run is always the most expensive and don't you forget it !
If they want 1 for £7 then send em over the road just like you would send em to the newsagents for a paper, or the pub for a pint!

[Dave271069]

accdave..... very naughty, but my way of thinking too!

you can send them to me all day long?
i just did a one off for a customer and hand delivered for free, must of loss about £5 with petrol and everything else, but once with the customer i walked away with a contract for all her shop window signage, Mugs, and keyrings, total will come to a couple of hundred pound, so yep ne off are sometimes just worth that loss leader or even just breaking even in my opinion.....

[phoenixalpha]

I know a company locally who charge £8.50 per tshirt, but do a min order of £30. So for a one off... it's £30, for 2 - £30, 3 - £30, 4 is £34 and so on. It encourages people to do more than one offs.

[remlap3]

I'm with accdave

Charge £9 get the people across the road to print it for £7 and you have made £2 for crossing the road

If t-shirt printing is not your main line of business and it is costing you money to do it, why not offer the service and job it out to your neighbours. You can then spend the time it would have taken to print your profitable orders. When the t-shirt is ready you just put it in one of your bags and sell it to the customer. If they then turn around any say 'That's great can I have 20 now' you can decide whether to take on that order or again job it out.

Just pick and choose what works best for you - it's not worth wasting a lot of time if there is another easier solution that may lead to the same result.

Just my opinion

[Johnny]

If the person printing isn't doing anything else at that point then why not have them making £2 or £3 rather than nothing? If there's time, I'd say do it.
We regularly print anything 1 to 5'000 and it's very unlikely that we lose money on it unless something goes wrong.
If you can sub out the work then great, but I wouldn't send them over the road as then they won't come to you for bigger stuff since you didn't do the first.
J.

[remlap3]

Completely agree - If you can do it any have the time, great. But there's no harm in offering the service and subbing it out. We are the same and tend to do have more smaller jobs from one-offs up to runs of 10, 20 or 30 but never really more than that for any one order for some reason.

[tlworkwear]

I have always charged more for a single top but will always try to upsell extra quantities or something else that I can provide to give them a better deal, I used to get mainly one offs but most of my recent orders have been stag/hen parties or charity/volunteer tops so the quantities have been higher anyway.