A guide to profitability for apparel decorators

It can feel like a trap. Your employees, your friends, and your parents all think you have it figured it out. You are a successful business owner with a building and a team you support. You print tens of thousands of T-shirts every month. Of course you are getting filthy rich, right? There is no way you have been running your business just to pay your bills and break even all this time — right?

The No. 1 reason I see busy, talented shops struggling to clear a healthy profit is their pricing. Pricing is hard, you feel like you have to be cheap to not lose the “big client” and, honestly, who knows what a printed T-shirt is really worth. Some guys sell them for $4 printed so you can’t possibly be too expensive — right?

Let’s break down how to build a pricing system that actually makes you make money. Real math, real margins, and real-world practicality. And if you want a tool to help you build your own print-only price sheets, visit merchtroop.com/price-sheet-creator, which we built specifically for this article. Play around with it and see what it takes to reach your profit goals in cold, hard numbers.

How did I get here?

Here’s the truth: most printers don’t know their numbers. They know how to print a perfect shirt, but they don’t know how to measure production hours, margin per print, or average job size. So they price based on fear that they’ll lose a customer.

But cheap doesn’t win. Cheap only guarantees you stay busy and broke. Sure, some contract shops are “cheap,” it’s true. You can run a profitable business making 70 cents a hit. But you better know your numbers down to the penny. This is not about encouraging you to raise all your prices — this is about knowing you aren’t working yourself to the bone for free.

A good shop owner understands that pricing has nothing to do with being the cheapest, and everything to do with being sustainable. You want a pricing system that:

• Covers overhead
• Pays you a real salary
• Allows for growth
• Works for retail and contract clients
• Adjusts easily when blank prices change
• Stays consistent across every employee

Let’s be honest — there will always be a shop in your area willing to undercut you by $1, $2, or even $5 per shirt. That’s fine. Let them be busy and broke. You need to be profitable or not do the work.

Customers don’t choose printers based on pennies. They choose based on confidence. And the ones who shop purely on price? Those are the customers who cause the most headaches. I took an order today for 389 sweatshirts for a bakery chain in California, using a one-color front and six-color back. I emailed the client a quote for $8,100 and she just paid it. The customer has worked with me for seven years. She isn’t shopping around every order. She knows we get it done right and that is all she cares about.

So your pricing should reflect the value of working with you — not the desperation of shops that are racing to the bottom.

Retail versus contract

Retail clients and contract clients are not the same. They don’t behave the same, they don’t require the same level of service, and they shouldn’t pay the same. Retail clients often require a great deal of hand holding. They do not have print-ready artwork or, worse, have no artwork at all. Contract clients, on the other hand, give you consistent orders in an organized system.

If you try to have one unified price sheet, you’ll either price retail too low or contract clients too high. Neither works long term. Separate the systems. Keep it simple. Your stress level will drop instantly.

Many shops are truly not ready for contract work and that is OK. I have seen so many shops with one automatic press go and beg for big contract accounts like Live Nation, only to be given a chance and discover that they spent three full days running 7,000 pieces a job and only made 90 cents per unit. And in the meantime, they have made all their smaller clients angry by destroying the calendar to accept the big order. If you want to do contract printing, learn the true demands and be prepared for a huge amount of units to go in and out of the building.

Screen printing versus DTF: Two different cost structures

Screen printing and direct-to-film (DTF) printing shouldn’t be priced the same because the work isn’t the same.

Screen printing has a great deal of up-front labor before the screens ever get clamped into your press. You need to be accounting for setup time per color, screen burning, ink mixing, screen cleaning, and artwork preparation. Sure, you could do 13 T-shirts with an eight-color print but are you pricing it high enough to account for the fact that in a one auto shop you may have lost two hours doing them?

This means you want to encourage and seek out print runs that make screen printing “worth it.” Scale your pricing based on the number of colors, give volume price breaks and make sure setup is included in your pricing, whether you make it visible to the client or average it into the total.

DTF, on the other hand, is a different business altogether. The machines are your labor and now you aren’t hiring skilled printers, you are getting people to load and unload a heat press. This pricing should account for the cost per square inch, something often ignored in screen printing. I charge my customers .06/square inch plus 1.50 for the pressing, but your numbers will vary greatly. DTF is predictable. The bigger the print, the higher the cost. A 3″ X 3″ pocket hit and a 12″ X 18″ back print are not remotely the same job, so the pricing should clearly reflect that.

So how in the world do I do the actual pricing?

Every shop needs to figure out this number: required margin per printed unit. This is the amount each print must contribute toward all of your overhead (payroll, rent, and insurance), plus the owner’s fixed salary and your profit target. And yes, you have to give yourself a fixed salary — you are an employee, not the person who just gets whatever is left.

You also need to create a profit target. The profit target is key because your goal is not just to pay your bills, it is to have a profitable business that one day you could sell or pass down to family. When you are gone, the business should be built to live without you. And the only way anyone will want the business is if it covers all expenses, including your labor, and still makes a profit.

Let’s say that your shop is a one-auto, three-person team. You run 160 production hours.

• When you average out all the setups and teardowns, you are printing 60 units per hour.
• You have $22,000 of fixed overhead and actually pay the owner.
• And your new goal is $8k profit goal.
• Capacity = 160 × 60 = 9,600 units
• Total margin needed = $30,000
• Margin per printed unit = $3.12
• That means every print — screen printing, DTF, anything — must generate at least $3.12 of margin to keep the shop healthy.

A small shop with that example capacity might need:

• 20 orders averaging 100 units to break-even
• 10 more orders to hit their profit target

Once you calculate this, your whole business becomes predictable. You know how many jobs you need, whether your average order size is too small, and whether your labor efficiency and output needs improvement.

The pricing calculator

So, I made you a tool to create a pricing calculator for your business. It is completely free and you can use it all you like here: merchtroop.com/price-sheet-creator

It is really eye opening to play with it and see what it takes for you to hit the goals you have for your business. It has variables for hourly output, production hours, and more, so you can use it with any size shop. Then when you get a result you like, simply copy and paste the tables into a spreadsheet or your print shop management software.

The big finish

Most printers undercharge because they’ve never been shown how to build a real pricing system. Once you anchor everything to your actual monthly output and your required margin per unit, the guesswork disappears. Your prices stop being random. Your shop stops being chaotic. And you finally start earning the money your experience, skill, and effort actually deserve.

I had a shop for years that I just kept thinking I could grow blindly and somehow become wealthy from it. I was so wrong. Today, my revenue is only 40% of what it used to be, but the margins are now so healthy I personally make far more for myself and my family. Build a business for you and make it healthy and profitable, not just stressful. I hope you have a successful 2026 and make more money than ever before. And if you see me at a trade show, say hi; I always love to hear from shop owners.