How to price DTF prints and custom garments

Price a DTF print by building up its true cost — materials, garment, labor, and a share of overhead — then applying a deliberate margin, rather than copying a competitor's price list. Shops that price by vibes usually discover too late that their best-selling item loses money once labor and reprints are counted. Here is a working model. All figures below are illustrative — plug in your own numbers.

Step 1: true material cost per print

• Film + powder — commonly $0.30–$0.80 per print depending on size and coverage
• Ink — meter it monthly and divide by prints; white ink usually dominates the bill
• Garment blank — your wholesale cost, including inbound freight, for finished-garment orders
• Waste factor — misprints, test prints, and unpacked film gaps. If your gang sheets run 70% utilization, 30% of your film spend is producing nothing

Step 2: labor per unit

Take a loaded hourly rate (wage + taxes + benefits) and divide by realistic throughput per stage: artwork handling, gang sheet building, pressing, quality check, packing. A shop pressing 30 garments an hour at a $22 loaded rate is spending about $0.73 per garment on pressing alone — before counting the ten minutes someone spent rebuilding a gang sheet in Photoshop. Automation changes this line more than any other: workflows that eliminate manual ganging and order matching routinely cut per-unit labor in half.

Step 3: overhead share

Rent, utilities, printer depreciation, RIP and software subscriptions, insurance. Sum it monthly, divide by monthly units, and add it to each unit. At 1,000 units/month with $3,000 of overhead, that is $3 per unit — a number many shops simply forget to charge for.

Step 4: set the margin deliberately

• Transfers only (customer presses): commonly priced per square inch — many shops land between $0.03–$0.10/sq in retail, with steep volume breaks
• Finished custom garments: 2.5–4× total unit cost is a common retail range; customization is the value, not the blank
• Contract/wholesale: thinner margins, but predictable volume — price against your true cost, not against hope
• Rush fees, size upcharges (2XL+), and artwork-fix fees exist because those costs are real; charge them

The hidden line items

Reprints and refunds are the margin killers pricing spreadsheets ignore. A blurry upload that ships is not one lost sale — it is the film, ink, garment, labor, outbound shipping, return handling, and the replacement, easily 3–4× the unit cost. This is why prevention (DPI gates at upload, mockup verification before pressing, complete-order checks before shipping) is pricing strategy in disguise: every prevented reprint is pure recovered margin.