Impressions - August 2015 - 63

way to recoup real costs on any given job.
But if you insist, you can use a penny per
square inch as a reference for sublimation
imaging costs. In actuality, it can be half
that amount with some of the new printers on the market and is not an efficient
way to establish pricing for any given job.
Let's say you were using a printer that
has an average image cost of 80 cents
for an 8" x 10" area - potentially a fullfront design on a T-shirt. If you could cut
ink costs by 50%, it would save 40 cents
in production costs - hardly a make-orbreak scenario.
Realistically, the ink cost typically is
less than 10% of the entire job's costs, so
this is not the place to save money. So let's
revisit the "time-is-money" concept.

MANAGING YOUR TIME
Assume yours is a full-time sublimation
shop and you have calculated your hourly
operation cost to be $30, which equals
50 cents per minute. Your operational costs
should be based on all business expenses
- administrative, marketing, insurance, office supplies, etc. Ink and paper are treated
as consumables that routinely have to be
restocked since you will be using those
items for samples and product testing,
among other things.
If you had a T-shirt with an 8" x 10"
design that took three minutes to print,
align and press, that works out to $1.50
in production costs (based on your hourly
operation cost of 50 cents per minute).
But if there also was a setup time of five
minutes associated with the job, it would
add another $2.50 to those costs. If you
have five minutes of post-production time
(removing the transfer paper, folding the
shirt, paperwork), that adds yet another
$2.50 in cost. That brings the total shirt
production cost to about $6.50. So where
is the best place to save some money: Reduce ink costs or shave off some time?
The key with sublimation is to understand that you make money when the heat
press is closed and operational, not when it's
open. Thus, you have to keep things moving. First, stage your work. On any given
order, you may have multiple types of substrates and it may be logical to focus on one
order at a time. But it's usually more efficient to break up your orders into sub-jobs
impressionsmag.com

Figure 2
Substrate

Production
Schedule

iPhone Covers
Metal Signs
Wooden Plaques
Mouse Pads
T-Shirts

18
12
18
6
24

based on substrate pressing parameters.
With sublimation, different substrates
may have different heat press settings
and setup requirements, all of which take
time. For example, an award plaque usually
requires heat press settings of 400°F for
one minute and medium pressure. But
a T-shirt requires about 370°F-390°F for
30-35 seconds and extremely light pressure. A lot of time would be spent switching between these two items.
On the other hand, if you broke up
your jobs so that you pressed all of your
plaques together, then all of your shirts
together, then maybe all of your metals
together, you would have long stretches
of true production broken up by shorter
periods of downtime.
Figure 1 shows a summary of three
work orders from three customers. If
you ran each order completely, then you
would encounter quite a bit of downtime
during the entire process. By comparison,
Figure 2 shows a production schedule that
was constructed using the concept of arranging work by heat press settings. Of
course, breaking up multiple orders into
lots of sub-jobs can be confusing, as you
have to keep up with the order each respective substrate is assigned. A simple,
low-tech solution is laundry baskets and
printed work orders.
Take each master work order and print
a copy for each sub-job within the order.
Place the substrates for each sub-job in a
laundry basket and tape the work order
copy to the side. Customer 1 would have
two baskets, Customer 2 would have four
baskets and Customer 3 would have three
baskets, with each clearly identified by the
work order taped to it. Then, it's just a matter of grabbing baskets by substrate type.
By the way, why laundry baskets? Because they are lightweight and uniform in

size, plus you can easily see what's inside
of them.
Print all of your images and distribute them into the baskets. Keep in mind
that you can put multiple images on a
single sheet of paper, but don't get too
carried away with trying to maximize
the paper. An 8.5" x 11" sheet of sublimation paper costs an average of about
20 cents, which may seem like a lot. But if
you spent two minutes trying to figure out
how to squeeze the most images into the
space, you would have used $1 worth of
time to save a few pennies.
There are lots of angles you can take
here, but the cost to produce something
is based on how many units you can produce in a given time period against the
operational costs assigned to that same
time period. The material cost (not the
cost of the blank) is just a percentage of
all of your operational costs, which have
to be accounted for in your production
numbers. In reality, material costs may be
immaterial when you look at the big picture because in the grand scheme of things
- time is money.
Award-winning author and international
speaker Jimmy Lamb has more than 20
years of apparel decoration experience. He currently is the manager of communications for
Sawgrass Technologies, Charleston. S.C. For
more information or to comment on this article,
email Jimmy at jlamb@sawgrassink.com.
Hear Jimmy speak on sublimation
topics at the 2015 Imprinted Sportswear
Shows (ISS). Individual seminars are just
$25 if you pre-register at issshows.com.

Suggested

Reading

Like this article? Read these and
other digital decorating articles at
impressionsmag.com:
* "Simple Sublimation
Solutions"
* "Sublimation Color
Management"
* "Short-Run Sublimation"

August 2015 | Impressions

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Impressions - August 2015

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