Cheap and easy t-shirt printing?

[Justintime]

Great, all in favour say "Aye". Oh wait...

[Gesso&Bole]

Thinking about this, perhaps this might be a useful business sideline for some picture framers, but i for one don't really have much idea of viable the business case for doing this might be and whether the set up cost for starting this as a business sideline would justify doing this on a smaller scale. I am not thinking about doing this myself, in particular because I don't think such a business has any viability in such a small rural town like mine and also that I'm not really motivated by the idea in the first place. A very long time ago my brother bought one of those iron on T-shirt transfer kit which you print on to with an ink jet printer and in those days these things were maybe not all that cheap, but the resulting T-shirt did not survive for many times in the washing machine, so how long a guarrantee would you have to give to a potential customer and could a customer later come back after maybe a year, or two and expect their money back. Also you would need to invest in a viable quanity of various sizes of T-shirt, so that you always could supply the right size of T-shirt for each customer, including small children.

Maybe there might be some other spin offs from doing just T-shirts, which don't immediately come to mind, such as corporaate apparel, but other markets like these might quite hard to break into. In the nearby town of Newton Abbot there is a fairly well established company called "Lazer Pics" who have been doing this sort of thing for decades, so it can be the basis of a solid and secure business, but there must be a lot of not generally known know how regarding how to exploit the various potential spin off marketing opportunities. I am guessing that most professional T-shirt printing companies will have a meaningful level of investment in professional quality stock and equipment, so the competition for those wishing to enter this market might be quite keen. There also is a smaller printers based in Newton abbot, which has a vinyl cutting machine and a heatedpress to bond vinyl to T-shirts, I spoke to them some years ago, when I was thinking about getting a T-shirt made up to produce a framed T-shirt for display in my shop window. Intrestingly they did not stock the T-shirts at all, but told their customers to supply their own T-shirt, which obviously saved them from needing to stock them at all.

My own thinking, would probably suggest thatgoing down the route of getting into buying a vinyl cutter instead would open up a better range of spin off opportunities and would also be seen as a more professional type of business, where customers would be more inclined to pay higher prices for the service. I can see good potential for adding vinyl lettering and logos,as part of some framing jobs, suppying stand out custom window advertising for other local shop and no doubt many other possibilities. Perhaps this idea has some much more interesting potential than some of us first were thinking. Considering the fact that many businesses are still closing down and selling off their equipment cheaply of sites like ebay, this may be a good time to pick up the right equipment and materials quite cheapy. Well at least it's a possible thought for some of us!

I can't actually see how any of the above could be described as 'useful' to anyone, even if the original post wasn't spam, and wasn't from years ago!

[vintage frames]

No analysis necessary Gesso&Bole.
It's all nonsense.
The guy doesn't see that its nonsense.
And even if today, he did accept that it is nonsense, tomorrow he would be back pushing out more nonsense.

There's nothing we can do.
We're all sitting beneath an anus of nonsense.

[Justintime]

"Anus of nonsense" I'm borrowing that!