Hey Readers,
Working on this blog for JNava has been inspiring and encouraging to the entrepreneur in me. Starting a successful business is a rewarding achievement, and when the foundation of that business is a passion you have something special. That’s what I hope to create in principle some day. For Jason Nava that meant making t-shirts. It started slow and as more of a hobby, but when you keep the idea of starting a business in the back your head, opportunities find you. After learning how Jason started out just making a few cool shirts for his friends I kind of realized that it might be easier than many think. So how do you make small batches of custom shirts? After a little research I found that there are a few ways to do things based on your budget and scale of production. The first step is buying blank shirts.
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JNava uses American Apparel shirts, which are very high quality, but also fairly expensive. If your plan is to try and make a little bit of money American Apparel probably isn’t the best place to start because costs will be high. However if you want to make a few special shirts meant to last then maybe something high quality is worth it. There is a learning curve to this and unless you pay a print shop to print your designs, you could ruin your first few shirts. You need to have a wholesale licence to see the American Apparel prices but t-shirt forums say that they are anywhere from $3.50 to $6.00 per shirt depending on quantity, color, size, and type. Hanes and other cheaper companies charge around $2.00 or less per shirt (t-shirtforums.com/find-wholesale-blank-t-shirts). I suggest practicing with cheap shirts or even some old used ones in the back of your drawer
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Making the shirts yourself requires a silk-screen press and a few other supplies. These can be basic homemade screens that you manually press ink through, or very pricey machines that automate certain tasks and allow for much faster production. There are beginner kits that start at a couple hundred dollars whereas the machine in the picture above is thousands of dollars. The extremely stripped down process includes making a stencil of your design, applying the ink in the appropriate places, and pressing it through the stencil into the fibers of the t-shirt. It is a simple process but I’m sure there is plenty of technique involved in getting it just right. Rather than trying to explain something I have never done I found a really good video on screen printing, check it out! I also linked to some silkscreen suppliers and related resources below. Good luck and perhaps I will be buying your shirts soon!
-Robert
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