Category: Signs and Banners

Fun with FeatherLight and Summer Fashions

Posted on by USCutter

Keep it light and breezy this summer with lightweight, wearable, and high-performance heat transfer vinyls from USCutter.

5 WAYS LESS CAN BE MORE ON ALL YOUR SUMMER FASHIONS:

1.) Thin Vinyl Looks Better on Thin Fashion Fabrics:

New FeatherLight by Siser, exclusive to uscutter.com, is only 1.6 mils thick! Compare to EasyWeed at 6 mils, FeatherLight is almost 75% thinner(!) and sticks to Lycra/Spandex stretch fitnesswear!

FeatherLight designs are lighweight and feel great!
FeatherLight designs are lighweight and feel great!

2.) Thin Feels Good on the Skin:

FeatherLight is very similar to Stretch in appearance, and works on materials besides cotton and polyester like thin stretchy fashion fabrics. It is mostly matte with a muted sheen like EasyWeed but its feel is more rubbery vs. papery. The biggest difference you’ll feel is on the inside of the shirt. Lightweight decals made from FeatherLight just feel more wearable and natural on the skin.

Spidery-thin details on a hat. Use negative space and save on materials!
Spidery-thin details on a hat. Use negative space and save on materials!

3.) Save Money on Materials with Spare Designs:

Use of thin details and negative space not only looks really sharp, it’s economical. The hat pictured here, crafted with thin FeatherLight vinyl, has a spartan look and feel to it, but will invite attention as people mentally fill in the rest of the image.

Fashion luxurious logos with a soft metallic sheen with Color Theory Thin Foil!
Fashion luxurious logos with a soft metallic sheen with Color Theory Thin Foil!

4.) Thin is In for Luxurious Logos:

Color Theory Thin Foil designs have a soft metallic sheen for high-end logos and graphics with urban flair, and are lightweight and wearable!

4 different colors to start!
Get FeatherLight Today! 4 different colors to start!

5.) Get Only the Amount of Materials You Need! Order by the Foot or Sheet!

FeatherLight is available in our Order By the Foot program, which allows you to get only the amount of vinyl you need at a competitive price, in the widest possible selection of colors for short runs and diverse projects with specific color requirements. For more savings, check out our Summer Siser Sale, where we have EasyWeed, Holographic, and Metallic vinyl available by the foot and by the sheet!

Doing the Math for Expanding into Custom Cap and Dye-Sub Printed Mug Production

Posted on by USCutter

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.
Decorate hats with the HTV of your choice, Chemica DuoFlex (pictured) or Siser EasyWeed.

What you need…

A vinyl cutter, a Transforsa Digital Cap Heat Press, 15″ x 5yd Roll of Siser EasyWeed.

Specialized Cap Heat Press + Free Hats for only $264.99!
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.
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.
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!

Heat Transfer Paper Alternatives for Decorating Shirts and Other Fabrics

Posted on by USCutter

USCutter has recently completed testing on an array of heat transfer papers currently available for sale (or soon will be) on our website.

Paropy papers from Joto and products from Forever can be less expensive, less manual, and more accessible to the beginning user than other methods of custom shirt production including silkscreen, DTG, HTV, and sublimation/Chromablast. And the beautiful part is, all you need to get great results in many cases is just a home laser toner or inkjet printer and a decent quality swing-arm heat press.

Check out this webcast of a webinar recently presented here at USCutter for a detailed overview of all the technology involved, from equipment to media, and some of our findings during testing, including shots of our quality output.

Heat Transfer Papers are the way to go if you want to create great-quality shirts with a minimal upfront investment. If you’re interested in starting out, we’d recommend the following products as being the most accessible for a beginner with the easiest (and most forgiving) learning curve.

Forever Flex-Soft is a 2-paper system that transfers toner from a printed A-sheet directly onto a fabric after a coating has been applied from a B-sheet with heat and pressure. The A-sheet comes in 1 of 10 colors we currently have available, including metallics and neons. Get a 10-pack of sheets (A+B+matte/gloss finishing sheets) for only $24.95, and save about half of what you’d pay for comparable products from Siser or Color Theory.

Gold metallic look at half the cost of heat transfer vinyl.
Gold metallic look at half the cost of heat transfer vinyl.

And unlike HTV, with Flex-Soft you can do very intricate designs with tons of detail, and transfer them immediately with no weeding, just a simple peel!

Look at the fine details on the tassels. Throw away your weeding knife. Peels right off!
Look at the fine details on the tassels. Throw away your weeding knife. Peels right off!

Perhaps the nicest part about the whole process is that the less expensive the toner printer is, the better the finished product is going to look because consistent thick toner fill on the A-sheet, like that spewed by more wasteful printers, is going to transfer a more solid filled design to the fabric.

Paropy papers from Joto are another easy painless way to transfer full-color images and photos without the need for layering or other manual tasks like cutting and weeding (Note: cutting around an image on CL 135 or 140 is recommended with a scissors to eliminate transfer of the background, and contour cutting is recommended for certain products intended for dark garments).

Joto Paropy Trimfree Light peels right off with no background - no trimming necessary.
Joto Paropy Trimfree Light peels right off with no background – no trimming necessary.
Paropy CL 135 has a very easy peel with consistent results for production and is recommended for beginners.
Paropy CL 135 has a very easy peel with consistent results for production and is recommended for beginners.

USCutter has many products compatible with your everyday inkjet printer, CMYK toner printer, or even CMYWT printers like the OKI C711WT with new white toner ink technology for transferring white and light-colored graphics and lettering onto dark garments with results that you couldn’t achieve otherwise without outsourcing your production!

Print white for letters and graphics on dark shirts for full-color transfers and even photos!
Print white for letters and graphics on dark shirts for full-color transfers and even photos!

 

Forever Laser-Dark (coming soon) transfers full-color photos!
Forever Laser-Dark (coming soon) transfers full-color photos!