Let's talk about screen printing spoilage.
What is spoilage?
In the garment decorating industry, spoilage simply means production errors.
Spoilage becomes expensive, fast – so it's very important to develop a strategy for minimizing spoilage in your shop.
You will lose clients and money if you don't plan for and actively control your spoilage.
When Does Screen Print Spoilage Happen?
In my experience at Campus Ink, spoilage is an inevitable part of doing business. That doesn't mean you should just accept spoilage and go about your business.
Here are the most common types of spoilage situations I've encountered:
Damaged wholesale goods. You intend to run a perfect order – but a few shirts arrive at your shop damaged. Since the order is on a tight deadline, you disregard them in the order and refund the customer.
Screen damage. Issues with emulsion, screen tension or flaws in the mesh cause you to print a few shirts incorrectly. While you try and catch this by carefully managing and inspecting your screens, it's often the case that the shirts are not fixable.
Off-center printing & bad registration. Your auto press is pumping out 400 shirts an hour –and later, your team alerts you that a few are off center. If you're fortunate, the order is large enough that you're able to discard those shirts and omit them.
Equipment failures & malfunctions. Your DTG printer decides it will have streaks on an order midway through printing a garment. If you're lucky, you catch it in time – if you're not, you ruin an untold number of perfectly innocent garments.
There are a lot of variables in the garment decoration industry: apparel styles, colors, garments, ink colors, screens, fabrics, processes, tools, machines – each and every one of these can introduce spoilage!
Producing consistently high-quality goods that thrill your customers? That's an ongoing challenge for every print shop, whether they're making $10 million or $10,000 a year – so don't fret if you're having spoilage issues.
Mistakes and errors do happen. It's inevitable!
So how do you handle spoilage correctly?
Here are the 5 most successful ways to deal with spoilage.
Read more:
https://www.printavo.com/blog/how-to-deal-with-spoilage
