On the surface, the shop looks healthy. Orders are coming in. The schedule is full. The press is running all week. But when owners look at the bank account, payroll, owner draw, or how much stress it takes just to keep things moving, something doesn’t add up. That’s because pricing in many screen-printing businesses is built on habit instead of intention. It’s often based on what the shop charged years ago, what another local shop charges, or what feels like a number customers won’t push back on.
The challenge is that screen printing is not just a creative business, it’s a production system. Every order moves through multiple steps before a shirt ever hits the dryer: art prep, mockups, approvals, screen coating and burning, press setup, test prints, production, teardown, reclaim, and customer communication. When pricing doesn’t reflect the full production cycle, shops end up busy but underpaid.
Strong pricing strategies help shops stop surviving order to order and start building predictable profit into the workflow.
Pricing Must Reflect Production Reality
Screen printing is not just ink on a shirt. It’s a chain of processes, and if pricing is built only around garment cost plus a print charge, shops miss the true cost of operating.
A strong pricing strategy starts with understanding what it actually costs to run your shop per hour. This includes labor (press, reclaim, art), rent, utilities, software, equipment payments, consumables, and yes, even owner compensation. Without this baseline, pricing becomes guesswork.
I remember a season early on where my shop landed a lot of small-to-mid size orders with multiple colors. On paper, the schedule looked great because it was full every single day.
What I didn’t see at first was how much time we were spending in setups, ink changes, and tear-downs instead of long, efficient press runs. By the end of the month, the press never stopped moving, but profit barely moved at all.
That’s when I understood that not all “full schedules” are created equal. Some just mean you’re busy doing low-margin work.
From there, pricing must acknowledge that screen printing has fixed time components on every job, especially setups. A 12-piece order with four colors takes just as long to set up as a 200-piece order with four colors. Treating both with the same “per print” logic leads to undercharging on small runs.
Read the rest of this article on Apparelist, a publication of PRINTING United Alliance, ASI’s strategic partner.
