Breaking down Ink cost.

[Robert Clark]

Real Talk: Ink Cost


Our premium inks cost more than our competitors. If you didn’t know that, I was totally kidding. Ignore me. Regardless, we are often asked how we can justify the higher price to the owner or general manager. Screen printers love the ink but they often are not in charge of budgets and other financial decisions. The first thing out of my mouth in these situations is something along the lines of “do you know how awesome we are” or my personal favorite “our ink actually works”. Unfortunately, this is not good enough for everyone. It’s enough for me but I am biased. Also, I don’t believe in money. I mostly work for food.

So what do we say? How do we convince non-screen printers that our ink is worth it short of telling you that we are the coolest, best, and sexiest company in the industry? This is pretty easy. Weigh the ink. Just weigh it. Get a scale. Put the ink on the scale. Weigh it. Okay, this sounds sillier than my Halloween costume when I was 16. The point is this, you can weigh a shirt before it is screen printed and then weigh it again afterwards to figure out exactly how much ink you have used. Once you know how little ink you actually print per shirt, you can do some fun math and know for a fact how much that print cost. Spoiler alert! It is much less than you expect. It isn’t enough for you to base your ink decisions on cost. Quality should win every time. I will prove it to you.

Grab one of our empty buckets. If you don’t have an empty bucket, pour out our competitor’s ink and make it empty. Don’t worry, it probably didn’t cost you much anyway. Weigh the empty bucket. Now weigh a fresh bucket of what is hopefully our ink. If it isn’t our ink, that’s okay for now. The difference in weight is ink…all ink. Precious not-a-commodity plastisol ink. This will vary quite a bit from ink to ink as the weight is not the same from color to color or ink series to ink series. There are a lot of reasons for this but we don’t need to get into details. Some inks are just heavier.

Now that you have a weight (hopefully in grams) for a gallon of ink, you can do a little math. What is the cost per gallon of this ink? You need this number to figure the cost per gram as that is where I am taking this party. I weighed a random gold ink and came up with 4620 grams. Depending on the cost of the ink, we can determine the price per gram very easily. I will do this for a few different price points:

Ink Price #1: $70.00 per gallon – $0.01515 per gram
 Ink Price #2: $100.00 per gallon – $0.02164 per gram
 Ink Price #3: $130.00 per gallon – $0.02813 per gram

So, how does this number help you determine the cost per print? Get that scale back out! You have work to do. What you need is a t-shirt, uniform, jacket, or whatever you are about to print. Weigh the apparel before you print it. Weigh it again after. Hey, there seems to be a weight difference here. That number is your ink consumption. I printed a 100% polyester tee. Before printing with the gold ink it weighed 140 grams. After it was printed with the gold ink, the weight was 144 grams. Okay, let’s do some math…4 grams. Yes! That has to be right! We have 4 grams of ink on the polyester tee.

blog_ink_weight

For those in a curious mood, the picture above is the print in question. It measures 6″ x 6″ with a little over a 50% fill. This is a print, flash, print with no white base. So let’s dive in…what did this actually cost me per shirt?

Cheapest Ink at $70.00 per gallon = 6.06 cents per shirt
 Middle Range Ink at $100.00 per gallon = 8.66 cents per shirt
 Premium Ink at $130.00 per gallon = 11.25 cents per shirt

Do you have auto insurance? I hope so. How about screen printing insurance? Never heard of it? The insurance plan is our premium ink. Whether it is our low temperature ink or one of our universal inks, our ink will prevent numerous problems which cause you hitting the redo button and paying for a bunch of fabric. What does our plan cost you? Well, looking at the per print cost, it may be 2 cents a shirt. It may be 5 cents a shirt. It depends on how much your current ink is and which of our premium ink options you choose. If I were you, I would give our low temperature ink a shot. ELT-S Series. Call me, I have stuff.

Run these numbers for yourself. Check your current ink price and check with us about the cost per gallon of a One Stroke Inks upgrade. For 2 cents a shirt, surely you can justify better prints, less problems, and no apparel replacement. Remember, replacing printed apparel costs much more than just the fabric. You must also account for the time, labor, shipping, and screens. It’s a couple of cents to not worry about these problems.


Robb Mears
Director, Product Development
One Stroke Inks

https://onestrokeinks.blog/

[Crazy Mike]

We have been using only the ELT-S inks for 18 months and very happy.

[mk162]

Robert makes the point I've been trying to make for a LONG time.

That $.02 a shirt does add up over time, until you take out the problems you get with cheaper ink.  We've tried almost every option out there.  OneStroke prints better most of the time.  We end up with less on press problems, less print/flash/print, etc.  Between OneStroke inks, and smart mesh, our prints are brighter, softer and look a ton better(not that customers notice, but we do).

I get suppliers in here all the time talking price. Performance comes before price.  Penny wise and pound foolish.

[T Shirt Farmer]

Robb


 For me more than the cost is the lack of west coast distribution and the the fact we get free shipping on orders over $200.oo if that changed we might take another look at you ink.

[Frog]

And, as I have told them for years, had they not pulled out of West Coast distribution, some more of us may have continued using their product.
Availability also plays a part in this equation.

 edit - T-Shirt Farmer's post, beating me to the punch just underscores this issue!

[GraphicDisorder]

Never tired the ink, do you have a sample kit we can buy or try? We use mostly wilflex currently.

[mk162]

Here's the inks I recommend from them:

357 white---amazing all around ink.  Print on poly, cotton, blends.  We use this when we are printing poly or any other bleeders, but if there is a cotton shirt or two in the mix, you don't have to change inks.

Smart series-- anytime you need something that can go on poly and darks without an underbase.

Comfort FF-- the colors in this series are really opaque and great top colors over a base.  They also work great on medium colors without an underbase.  I haven't really tried it on darks yet, but I'm assuming it would be pretty good.

[numbercruncher]

Just curious the 144 gram weight of the tee after printing - was it flashed and cured?

[Robert Clark]

Just curious the 144 gram weight of the tee after printing - was it flashed and cured?

Yes PFP then Cured

[mk162]

Your weights are off.  Shirts contain moisture, unless you checked the weight of the shirt after running it through the oven right before printing.

i would have re-weighed right before curing.

No telling how much the numbers would be off, but I bet they would be a little bit. I just checked it and the sample shirt lost about 5% of it's weight through the oven.  it wieghed 334 grams and dropped by 18 grams.

[Nation03]

I was a fan of the versamax series a while back. I have a smaller dryer so I might try the ELT-S series to potentially get more shirts per hour printed. To me that would justify the extra cost. Is there free shipping at a certain price point? As good as the ink probably is - $130 a gallon + shipping is steep.

[Robert Clark]

I was a fan of the versamax series a while back. I have a smaller dryer so I might try the ELT-S series to potentially get more shirts per hour printed. To me that would justify the extra cost. Is there free shipping at a certain price point? As good as the ink probably is - $130 a gallon + shipping is steep.

Here is a nice booklet on the ELT Series.

[Prince Art]

We've used the ELT-S black & white a lot, and like them. My two favorite attributes are the low cure temp, and the amount of stretch. These both are great for the lightweight fashion blend tees that are our bread & butter.

Aside from high cost (which I think we could live with given the benefits), there's one big issue I haven't been able to get past well enough to buy into the series/mixing system as our go-to ink: It doesn't reclaim easily like other inks. Specifically, the ink doesn't break down enough, and then won't rinse off cleanly. This also inhibits proper stencil degredation. Result is that the ink doesn't easily rinse off at the pressure spray stage, and instead tends to come off in stringy, stretchy, filter-clogging pieces. All in all, requires a lot more work to fully reclaim. And the longer the screens sit, the worse the problem is.

This may well have to do with the specific chemical combination in our shop, or something like that. But it is unfortunately the biggest impediment keeping us from embracing the ELT [-S] inks. And Robert, if you have any suggestions to overcome this, I'd be glad to hear. FYI: Our emulsion is Saati's Textil PV (pure photopolymer), Easiway Supra in the tank, and Easiway 701 for final ink/stain removal. (But we also had the problem when we were using Saati PW4 + Franmar Strip-e-doo in spray bottles.)

Again, this is not a complaint against the performance of the ink itself, which really has been a great help to us - just a hurdle that keeps us from buying into it in a bigger way.