From Articunos to Zapdos, Pikachus to Porygons, Pokemons are taking over the planet and possessing the screen-absorbed pupils of the populace.
Cool cellphone cases at the tips of your fingers with custom game imagery!
Entrepreneurs are cashing in on the craze, too, acting as uber escorts, or making window signs advertising local resident Pokemons.
Don’t miss the boat. Use your Sawgrass dye-sublimation printer and commonly available blanks to make your own shirts, cups, coasters, water bottles, and cellphone cases.
Here is what USCutter Creative Laboratories came up with: what can you create?
There are an array of products one can start making immediately with an enterprising mindset and the basic equipment for this business: a decent vinyl cutter and heat press.
Vinyl graphics and letters for signs and indoor walls, decals for shirts, etc. Not surprisingly, the stuff that’s easiest to do, with the lowest up-front investment in equipment, also presents the greatest barriers to successfully differentiating yourself in a crowded marketplace.
So what’s true for any business, is true for this one. To have success, one has to diversify one’s product offerings, and ideally specialize in a niche with plenty of room to grow. Two products you may not have considered to expand into yet are customized ballcaps and dye-sublimation printed mugs.
We’d like to present the business case here for expanding into both processes. Both processes require an investment in specialized equipment, but the following math will demonstrate you can break even on cap production with sales of only 40 caps, and you can buy all the equipment for dye-sublimation printing (with applications ranging from printed mugs, to photo panels, to shirts, and more) with sales of only about 180 mugs!
CUSTOM CAPS:
Decorate hats with the HTV of your choice, Chemica DuoFlex (pictured) or Siser EasyWeed.
Specialized Cap Heat Press + Free Hats for only $264.99!
Assuming you cut a design 4 in wide x 2.5 in high, you can produce 180 heat transfer vinyl decals from a 5 yard roll of EasyWeed ($35.65). This works out to be about 20 cents/hat in vinyl.
The cost of blank hats is going to be your main expense. The cost of hat blanks and vinyl to produce 180 hats is $575.20. 1 hat costs about $3.20 to make. Let’s say you can sell that hat for $12.
Profit/hat = $8.80. The cost of your equipment ($264.99) + the necessary hats (36 more) = $372.90. Divide that by your profit/hat ($8.80), and you’ve almost completely paid for your equipment with sales of about 40 hats!
DYE-SUB PRINTED MUGS:
Put family photos or any image on a mug with vibrant dye-sublimation inks.
What you need…
A Sawgrass Dye-Sublimation Printer, a mug press or 5-in-1 multi-press, sublimation transfer paper, dye-sublimation inks, and cases of mugs.
The cost of the equipment in this bundle (SG400 printer + 5-in-1 heat press + mug paper) is only $799. It only costs about 10 cents in ink to print 1 5″x7″ mug design. The cost to decorate a case of 36 mugs would be $3.60 in ink, $3.24 in paper, and $56.99 for the cost of the mugs.
All the equipment and supplies you need to get started sublimating mugs for only $799.
Total cost of supplies to decorate 36 mugs = $63.83 –> $1.77/mug. If you sell the mugs at $8/ea, that works out to be $6.23 profit/mug.
At that clip, paying for all the equipment and supplies (printer, heat press, ink, paper, and mugs) you needed to make 180 mugs would cost you about $1118. Divide this by our profit/mug, and with sales of about 180 mugs, you’ve just paid for all your equipment and supplies, and each additional mug sold is almost pure profit! And a dye-sub printer comes in handy for so much more, from shirts, to jerseys, to Wunderboard metal photo panels, to clear vinyl, and beyond!
Deadpool fever is sweeping the nation, delighting and repelling audiences young and old alike, with its slick stylistic sensibility and crude anti-hero antics. Everywhere normal citizens feel inspired to join the Deadpool movement, responding to its highly effective head-scratching guerilla marketing campaign, and hoping to copy its artful and original winning formula of super-snark and unsentimental heart.
From cut vinyl t-shirt designs, to dye-sublimated tiles and mousepads, check out these cool applications you can also do very easily with USCutter equipment and materials.
1.) Deadpool Logo T-Shirt
We used a Titan II, 60 g’s of pressure, and speed of 36 mm/s, to cut the red bottom layer from Color Theory Thin Foil.
Color Theory Thin Foil red base layer.
The eye “sockets” are Chemica 3D-Fashion Flex Carbon texture, and the eye “balls” are Color Theory White Glitter (both materials cut at 90 g’s of pressure). The 3D and Foil are cold peel products.
Layer different effects, including Carbon 3D, Glitter, and Thin Metallic Foil.
We used a pressing temperature of 168 degrees Celsius for 30 seconds to apply each layer, with the last layer of Glitter being a hot peel. The thin foil held up very well, with the final peel adding a distressed look to it which seemed to work well with the aesthetic of the movie.
