[amayausers] Re: Towels (You're the man!!! $1.50 plus $5 hoopcharge)
- From: "Roland R. Irish III" <signman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <amayausers@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 07 Jul 2005 08:26:59 -0400
I'm curious-you said you did $180k in sales the first year, for $7 per dozen
for a 4 color back and 1 color front. Obviously you made a good profit-and
must have done a huge volume-not small orders-to gross that much in one
year. It figures out to 11¢ per color, per print. But your contractor only
produced 2-3 dozen shirts per hour and went broke after a year. For me, that
translates to 'underpricing' by the contractor and he went broke because he
wasn't making enough profit!
I do have many, many catalogs that have low prices on screenprinting-as low
as 10-15¢ per color per print-but not for small orders-the lower prices are
for quantities that are huge. One catalog I'm looking at-their 'print
charge' for screen printing is as follows: 1-99/ 52¢ 100-299/ 36¢
300-1199/ 28¢ 1200-2499/ 24¢
for embroidery- (up to 7500 stitches) 1-99/2.04 (27.2¢ per k) 100-299/same
300-1199/ 1.68 (22.4¢ per k) and so on. This is ADDED to their piece good
price-so there is a profit markup on the products from their catalog. For
each additional thousand stitches, they charge 24¢ per thousand, flat rate
no matter what quantity. So anything I order from them for one of my
customers I have an automatic 50% markup on the product in small quantities
down to 35% for higher quantities, and a 20% markup over these print or
embroidery charges as shown in their catalogs. This is for a USA based
company-all imprinting is done here in the US although the products may be
imported. I have other catalogs, mostly for high volume hats-that have
embroidery charges of half that, but minimum quantities on the hats are
usually 144 or higher. With the low low wages and overhead of the 'imports'
and cheap labor overseas, of course their charges are going to be 10¢ or so
per thousand. But we can't figure OUR prices on 'import' goods-or we'd go
out of business real fast.
Your prices have to reflect your costs-your overhead, your wages, etc. If
you paid the same price as I did for your Amaya, either cash or through a
lease-you have a monthly payment of $400-$500 per month, plus electricity,
insurance, etc. If you are running the machine non stop for 5 hours a day, 5
days a week-then your 'cost' of just the machine is going to be $4.00 -
$5.00 per hour JUSt to pay for the machine. If you have a small shop like
mine-where it runs only when I have orders-I average only ONE day a week on
the machine-so MY cost is around $20-$25 PER HOUR for that machine. So that
has to figure into the actual charges for anything I do. My engraving
machine was paid for finally last year-four years at $375.00 per month.
Sometimes it ran 5 days a week, 10 hours a day-sometimes it sits and does
absolutely nothing for weeks-since I do very little retail work-most of it
is wholesale for other jewelry stores. My 'rates' for engraving are the same
as all the other engravers and laser engravers I know in the area- $60 per
hour. Laser engravers make a lot more profit though- they can engrave in 2
minutes what my machine does in 20 minutes. BUT their laser cost $30,000.
Mine was s$15,000. The shop that does my volume embroidery has 10 Amayas-so
he can do ten times as much work per hour as I do-but his investment was ten
times as much as mine! But his LABOR costs are no different-I have one
person watching one machine-he has one person watching TEN machines-so they
are ten times as efficient.
As long as you are making a PROFIT, paying your bills, buying your supplies,
and paying your wages, then you are on the right track. If you aren't
showing a profit at the end of the month-then your prices are too low! I pay
around $800 per month for propane to heat my building in the winter-where
you are, maybe you don't have 3 feet of snow in january and don't have the
heating bills we do. So you don't have to figure in that expense.
Roland
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