Are you Profitable or just Busy?
It can feel like a trap. Your employees, your friends and parents all think you have it figured it out. You are a successful business owner with a building and a team you support. You print tens of thousands of t-shirts every month. Of course you are getting filthy rich right? There is no way you have been running your business just to pay your bills and break even all this time- right?
The number one reason I see busy talented shops struggling to clear a healthy profit is their pricing. Pricing is hard, you feel like you have to be cheap to not lose the “big client” and honestly who knows what a printed t-shirt is really worth. Some guys sell them for $4 printed so you can’t possibly be too expensive- right?
Let’s break down how to build a pricing system that actually makes you make money. Real math, real margins, and real-world practicality. And if you want a tool to help you build your own print-only price sheets, you can use the free calculator at merchtroop.com/price-sheet-creator, which we built specifically for this article. Play around with it and see what it takes to reach your profit goals in cold hard numbers.
My God, how did I get here!
Here’s the truth: most printers don’t know their numbers. They know how to print a perfect shirt, but they don’t know how to measure production hours, margin per print, or average job size. So they price based on fear. “But I am gonna lose my customer”. “They would never pay that much!”. “I just need any money I can get”.
But cheap doesn’t win. Cheap only guarantees you stay busy and broke. Sure some contract shops are “cheap”, it's true, you can run a profitable business making .70 a hit. But you better know your numbers down to the penny. This is not about encouraging you to raise all your prices, this is about knowing you aren’t working yourself to the bone for free.
A good shop owner understands that pricing has NOTHING to do with being the cheapest, and EVERYTHING to do with being sustainable. You want a pricing system that:
Covers overhead
Pays YOU a real salary
Allows for growth
Works for retail AND contract clients
Adjusts easily when blank prices change
Stays consistent across every employee
Let’s be honest—there will always be a shop in your area willing to undercut you by $1, $2, or even $5 per shirt. That’s fine. Let them be busy and broke. You need to be profitable or not do the work.
Customers don’t choose printers based on pennies. They choose based on confidence. And the ones who shop purely on price? Those are the customers who cause the most headaches. I took an order today for 389 Sweatshirts for a bakery chain in CA, 1 color front and 6 color back. I emailed her a quote for $8100 and she just paid it. Naila has worked with me for 7 years. She isn't shopping around every order. She knows we get it done right every time and that is all she cares about.
So your pricing should reflect the value of working with you—not the desperation of shops racing to the bottom.
Retail vs Contract
Retail clients and contract clients are not the same. They don’t behave the same, they don’t require the same level of service, and they shouldn’t pay the same. Retail clients often require a great deal of hand holding. They do not have print ready artwork or even worse have no artwork at all. Contract clients on the other hand give you consistent orders in an organized system.
If you try to have one unified price sheet, you’ll either price retail too low or contract clients too high. Neither works long term. Separate the systems. Keep it simple. Your stress level will drop instantly.
Many shops are truly not ready for contract work and that is OK. I have seen so many shops with one auto go and beg for big contract accounts like Live Nation. Only to be given a chance and discover they spent 3 full days running 7,000 pieces a job and only made .90 a unit. And in the meantime they have made all their smaller clients angry by destroying the calendar to accept the big order. If you want to do contract printing, learn the true demands of the space and be prepared for a huge amount of units to go in and out of the building.
Screen Printing vs DTF: Two Different Cost Structures
Screen printing and DTF shouldn’t be priced the same way because the work isn’t the same.
Screenprinting has a great deal of up front labor before the screens ever get clamped into your press. You need to be accounting for Setup time per color, Screen burning, Ink mixing, Screen Cleaning and Art work preparation. Sure you could do 13 t-shirts with an 8 color print but are you pricing it high enough to account for the fact that in a one auto shop you may have lost 2 hours doing them? This means you want to encourage and seek out print runs that make screenprinting “worth it”. Scale your pricing based on the number of colors, give volume price breaks and make sure setup is included in your pricing whether you make it visible to the client or average it into the total.
DTF on the other hand is a different business altogether. The machines are your labor and now you aren’t hiring skilled printers, you are getting people to load and unload a heat press. This pricing should account for the cost per square inch, something often ignored in screenprinting. I charge my customers .06/sqinch plus 1.50 for the pressing, but your numbers will vary greatly. DTF is predictable. The bigger the print, the higher the cost. A 3×3 pocket hit and a 12×18 back print are not remotely the same job, so the pricing should clearly reflect that.
So how in the world do I do the actual pricing?
Every shop needs to figure out this number:
Required Margin Per Printed Unit
This is the amount each print must contribute toward all of your overhead (payroll, rent, Insurance) plus the owner’s fixed salary and your profit target. And yes you have to give yourself a fixed salary, you are an employee not the guy that just gets whatever is left. And you need to create a profit target. The profit target is key because your goal is not just to pay your bills, it is to have a profitable business that one day you could sell or pass down to family. When you are gone the business should be built to live without you. And the only way anyone will want the business is if it covers all expenses including your labor and still makes a profit.
Let’s say your shop is a 1 auto 3 man team :
You run 160 production hours
When you average out all the setups and teardowns you are printing 60 units per hour
You have $22k of fixed overhead and actually pay the owner.
And your new goal is $8k profit goal
Capacity = 160 × 60 = 9,600 units
Total margin needed = $30,000
Margin per printed unit = $3.12
That means every print—screen printing, DTF, anything—must generate at least $3.12 of margin to keep the shop healthy.
A small shop with that example capacity might need:
20 orders averaging 100 units to hit break-even
10 more orders to hit their profit target
Once you calculate this, your whole business becomes predictable. You know how many jobs you need, whether your average order size is too small, and whether your labor efficiency and output needs improvement.
The Pricing Calculator- um Calculator
So I made you a tool to create a pricing calculator for your business. It is completely free and you can use it all you like here- https://merchtroop.com/price-sheet-creator
It is really eye opening to play with it and see what it takes for you to hit the goals you have for your business. It has variables for hourly output, production hours, and more so you can use it with any size shop. Then when you get a result you like simply copy paste the tables into a spreadsheet or your print shop management software.
The big finish
Most printers undercharge because they’ve never been shown how to build a real pricing system. Once you anchor everything to your actual monthly output and your required margin per unit, the guesswork disappears. Your prices stop being random. Your shop stops being chaotic. And you finally start earning the money your experience, skill, and effort actually deserve.
I had a shop for years that I just kept thinking I could grow blindly and somehow become wealthy from it. I was so wrong. Today my revenue is only 40% of what it used to be but the margins are now so healthy I personally make far more for myself and my family. Build a business for you, make it healthy and profitable, not just stressful. I hope you have a successful 2026 and make more money than ever before. And if you see me at a tradeshow say hi, I always love to hear from shop owners.
