Making Shirts with Vinyl - Where We All Started
by John Reese
Ahh vinyl. The tried and true entry into shirt making! My wife started our first apparel shop the old fashioned way with a silhouette (or cricut) and a cheap heat press off of Ebay. This is how most small apparel shops get their start. There is a reason for that, the cost of entry is pretty low. The equipment is very available and within a few hours of figuring out how .svg and cut files work, you can be off to the races!
Vinyl is durable and fairly easy to work with. If you have kids they can usually be bribed into weeding out the designs. There are four problems that you are bound to run into.
The Cricut or Silhouette you start off with is not going to be fast enough when sales start rolling in. If you start getting busy, the sound of the blade slowly cutting your individual sheet of vinyl will become agonizing. You can overcome this by upgrading equipment.
Once you can justify getting a more commercial roll-fed vinyl plotter, it will feel life changing. The speed and efficiency is astounding. You still have three problems remaining.
Everyone uses vinyl and it becomes very difficult to stand out from the crowd. Most designs are going to be one solid color. You can do multiple colors in a design, but it takes more time and creates more opportunity for errors, which really starts to suck your time and profits away. Working with a basic vinyl cutter leaves you with a monochromatic product line that will have to compete in a full-color world.
You can upgrade. There are vinyl printers out there that can print full color designs on vinyl and then cut them out. To be honest, if you end up with this equipment, you will eventually learn that it is better suited for making decals, and that those are probably easier to do than shirts.
This leads us to the last two problems and this next one is a big one. Lots of consumers don’t like vinyl. Vinyl is really durable and lasts for a very long time and the colors are bold and sharp, so why is it that so many people don’t like it? The first reason is the hand, or how it feels on the shirt. Most vinyl feels thick and heavy on the shirt, especially on lighter shirts like tri-blends or cotton-poly blends.
The second reason lots of people shy away from vinyl is that it has a bad reputation for durability. I know, in the previous paragraph I said vinyl lasts for a long time, and it will if applied correctly. If not applied correctly, the vinyl may not bond correctly with the shirt and begin peeling or falling apart. Do you remember way back at the beginning of this rant about vinyl? Most people get started on vinyl and use cheap heat presses to start with. The learning curve of new shirt makers and inconsistent heat from cheap presses will often result in poorly bonded vinyl and consumers that don’t trust it.
I almost forgot the last problem you are going to face. Your kids that were helping you weed vinyl are nowhere to be found, they left the designs they were working on for the past hour undone and are in another room watching Bluey.
In the next installment we will continue looking at shirt-making methods with another quick look at Print on Demand services.