If you’re asking yourself, “How much should a custom t-shirt cost?” We have answers for you! In this beginner’s guide, we’ll walk you through how to price your garments using Supacolor transfers and how to use your total cost of goods, labor cost, and profit margin, to determine what you should sell your shirts for. We used an example of an order for 10 custom shirts with Supacolor transfers.
Cost Of Goods:
Starting with our garments, we chose the District Perfect Blend Tees in Heathered Brown. By entering the size and quantity, you then can calculate the total cost for the shirts.
10 Shirts x $4.65 = $46.50
Next, let’s go over how to calculate the cost of your transfer. If you are using HTV, you can estimate the amount of vinyl needed to complete a project with our HTV calculator, or just add up the amount you used after the fact.
For this example we are using Supacolor transfers. The design we chose will fit on an A5 size sheet and we need 10 transfers, totaling $55.80.
If there are any other materials that you use such as a custom tag, neck label, packaging, or anything else that goes into the product, add that cost in as well.
Add this all together to get your total cost of goods. For us, that’s $102.30
10 Shirts x $4.65 = $46.50
10 Transfers x $5.58 = $55.80
Total cost of goods = $102.30
Labor Cost:
To understand the labor cost, you need to know how long it takes to complete a project and how much you would need to pay someone to do that work. For our example, we used Supacolor transfers. We just needed to press them, so it was a speedy process. To completely press this transfer and fold up the garment took less than two minutes, so 10 shirts would take about 20 minutes. Adding in the time it took us to order all the materials and other factors, let’s just say it takes one hour of work to complete this project.
For this example we will pay $15 per hour of work, so our total labor cost for this project is $15. Add your total labor cost to the total cost of goods to get your total cost to produce: $117.30
Labor cost = $15 Total Cost of Goods = $102.30
Total Cost to Produce $15 + $102.30 = $117.30
Profit Margin:
Lastly, you need to choose what profit margin you’re looking for.
For this example, we’re wanting a 50% profit margin. We took our total cost of $117.30 and multiplied it by two. This results in getting a sale price of $234.60 for this order of 10 graphic t-shirts. That's $22.88 per shirt. If you were selling these shirts individually you could round up to a sale price of $25 per shirt.
Now you know the basics of pricing your custom decorated garments using Supacolor transfers. For information about pricing t-shirts using HTV, refer to our blog How to Price Custom T-shirts Using HTV. Here is a great video to go along with this blog: