Impressions - January 2015 - 69

If you are considering adding sublimation to your shop, base your
decisions on production efﬁciency, not just the initial price tag.

spread out over longer periods of time -
even with a higher price per piece - is the
realistic solution. Plus, waiting until the
absolute last minute to place an order ensures that customers keep money in their
hands longer.
Do you shake your head and decline
the order? Better think again. If you say
"No," your client will search for someone
else to fulﬁll it. If you increase your rush
fees, customers may balk. It's the same
thing with quantity discounts: If you put
higher surcharges on smaller quantities,
you may be encouraging customers to
search for alternatives.
So what are your options?
Your ﬁrst step is to review the logistics
in terms of production output with your
current equipment. For example, if you are
a screen printer, small runs of multicolor
images will not be proﬁtable because of
the setup time. And that same setup time
makes it difﬁcult to deliver same-day or
even 24-hour service. The same concept
also can apply to embroidery when you
consider digitizing, job setup and run times.
The limiting key factor for efﬁcient
production is downtime, as it costs money
but doesn't generate any. However, you
still must account for it in your pricing.
For example, if it took an average of one
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hour to set up a job (downtime), but only
15 minutes to produce it and your operational costs were $20 per hour (probably
more), you would have $20 in downtime
and $5 in production time. But you would
have to charge $25 to recover your total
costs, which may be way out of line, depending on the item.
In comparison, you easily can recoup
the setup time on a large run because
your equipment will stay busy producing
revenue for an extended period of time,
before the next period of extended downtime (setup).

SUBLIMATION SOLUTIONS
The reality is that short-run or ondemand jobs may not be ideal with your
current equipment setup. Thus, you may
need to evaluate some new production
processes that help you manage the jobs
that don't ﬁt into your current production
mix. Remember that some of those crazy
small jobs may come from your best customers, so it will pay to take them on -
even if you lose money.
But why lose money if you don't have
to? There are several low-cost decoration
options that can easily, and proﬁtably, give
you the ability to handle on-demand and
short-run jobs.

At the top of the list is sublimation,
which has an average production time of
two to three minutes per cycle. Keep in
mind that, depending on the size of the
product, one production cycle could generate multiple pieces. And with systems
starting at $500 (not including a heat
press), the start-up cost is far lower than
screen printing, embroidery, direct-togarment printing, laser-powered decorating, etc.
In addition to being low-cost and
efﬁcient, sublimation also opens doors to
a wider range of merchandise, including
promotional products, signage, awards,
souvenirs, personalized gifts and more.
On the surface, sublimation looks a lot
like some of the other digital heat-transfer
processes, but it's what occurs below the
surface that separates it from all other decoration technologies. With this decorating
process, you actually are dyeing the material through molecular bonding rather than
printing on the surface.
The process begins with printing an image onto sublimation transfer paper, then
using a heat press to apply the image to the
substrate. During this phase, the sublimation dye on the paper turns into a gas and
penetrates into the polymer components of
the substrate. When the heat is removed,
January 2015 | Impressions

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Impressions - January 2015

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