Starting a Sportswear Clothing Brand From Home with Sublimation

if you start your own sportswear company you could be in store for massive paydays I like money but how long does it take to turn a profit how do you even get your clothes made the secret to getting these designs on breathable fabric is with sublimation printing today we're taking you through the whole process and we're going to compare the differences between a two million dollar sublimation shop and our four thousand dollar home sublimation setup by the end of this video you'll be able to decide if you're apparel business should go big or stay home [Music] first things first what even is sublimation printing these clothes are pretty easy to spot actually some of my favorite examples are those cool NBA dry fit jerseys and the shirts that you see Pro fishermen wear they're typically polyester stretchy and have lots of color printed on the Garment so now that you understand the general concept of sublimation printing let's see what pieces we can make from home with very little experience we'll start with something easy that we know we can sell and that's funky socks all we have to do is print out our design press it onto blank socks we're gonna sell these and become successful to get an idea for how everything will look I used a Photoshop mock-up template from envato elements I was able to just click and drag my designs into the PSD and try to find different sizes and placements and go with what I thought looked good the print looks good so far okay and he presses ready look at that that's what we're looking like it's like a little finger roll all right so that should help us from having a line down the side of our socks moment of truth I did 375. 40 seconds because I noticed at 400 my was getting a little over baked we're gonna code it's looking pretty cool already yo successful let's do the other side this is the part where it gets a little harder because now I gotta line the stripe up so it goes all the way around I never pick easy shots why I'm hard bro ah see that's what I was trying to avoid that's not bad though stripes are there though stripes are lined up nice warm socks like fresh out the dryer now most of a home setup was secured from heat transferwarehouse.com and we decided to go with the sg-1000 printer and the wallapress pro now our heat press was 1300 but if you don't want all the bells and whistles they do have lower priced options anything that you purchase for your business should have a return on investment and the best investments that you can make are the ones that save you both time and money by purchasing a lower end piece of equipment you're essentially trading your personal time in order to save money a higher end piece of equipment will make it easier to produce more per hour which will ultimately make you more money but when you're just getting started it's sometimes hard to justify a large purchase but you do need to keep this in mind and it's okay if you have to put in a little bit more reps with the lower price product as those are also available on a heat transferwarehouse.com sometimes we can't overthink it and we got to do with what we have now let's check back in with Cody now let's move on to the fun stuff it's Jersey I wanted to bump up the design a notch so I'm making Jersey and shorts with holographic heat transfer vinyl the numbers and our ftgu Academy Crest will be Hollow foil but that not enough we're also going to sublimate on top of the HTV to give like a crazy design going on on here first step is to figure out how big I want the elements to be on my design for my jersey the team name is six inches wide the numbers are going to be seven and a half inches wide in the academy Crest two and a half inches wide we want the HTV to sit underneath the sublimation print so we'll cut out our vinyl on the Cricut and press it into our fabric for only five seconds we don't want the fool press yet just enough to tack it on there once our vinyl is set we just print our sublimation paper cut out each element carefully place the paper on top the vinyl now we do a full press to fuse everything together when pressing vinyl like this you want to make sure you're using very high pressure or else you'll get that nasty peel effect the first time you wear it and nobody wants that let's hang it up let's get to the shorts and check out this design for the original shorts they were black with a white monogram print all over them but then John informed me I would be pushing the limits of our home setup now for us to get the monogram print on our shorts we would have had to start it with a raw sheet of fabric that would get the whole design printed on it before the fabric was cut so it could be sewn together because if we attempted to do an all-over print with these blank shorts that we got from the store all the wrinkles the folds the cuts on the design it would all get in the way and ultimately make the product look like crap with this in mind we got rid of our monogram design for this sample and we decided to use a white polyester shorts to sublimate on for cutting our vinyl we're using the qriket maker 3 which is a great option for anyone that's starting a home-based business [Music] let's go [Music] now let's break down how much we spent and how fast we can actually turn a profit shall we I mentioned that I spent about four thousand dollars for everything here at our home sublimation kit that includes the laptop the qriket maker 3 our sg-1000 sublimation printer kit the wallapress pro heat press and our blanks in case you didn't notice we actually got the blanks from the Walmart clearance rack not too bad I would say we only paid ten dollars for the jersey and eight dollars for the shorts so if we price the jersey and the shorts at forty five dollars each our break even point is after selling 50 outfits after those initial sales your equipment is paid off and your price margins open all the way up and that's not even including the socks we made keep in mind there will be reoccurring costs such as ink paper and electricity but once you have that customer base this whole setup is legit a money printer now we showed you how you can get great results with sublimation printing from home but what if you want to go big what if you want to fill thousands of orders per day and truly scale your business up well our buddy Jeff the owner of genre Sports is doing just that he's invested over two million dollars in his operation and he prints for Major Brands and sports teams let's go over there and find out if he should go big or stay home Jeff so thank you once again for opening up your shop and letting us come in and kind of get a little taste of what to expect so as a new brand owner what should they expect and what should they have ready to start working with you you know I prefer people to come to me when they have very clear idea of what they actually want design wise and hopefully an ability to sell it just making samples and then saying oh we're going to try to promote it I'm a little busy for that kind of work so I'd rather work with someone who's operating making some sales already and that has a sublimation idea in mind do you have minimum order quantities to start working to start working yes I'd like a minimum of 12 and you know once you hit 36 pieces the pricing starts to get more attractive once we have a relationship and we've done some orders I do one piece stuff you know we're in the team sports business so it's very common to you know one kid add-on or someone lost the Jersey so we deal with that all the time but I don't want to start a relationship with a new customer for one piece that makes sense because there's a lot of costs involved with uh with operating your your entire operation so can you tell me a little bit like even whatever you're willing to share I'm estimating it's a two million dollar operation but how much millions have you invested over the years into this business invested the machinery and everything wise yes there's been a couple million dollars a couple million dollar operation here so because in this video we were showing them how to do something with a four thousand dollar setup and I'm like but if they want to go big and they have to go somebody that has all the equipment to go big right or invest millions of dollars and trying to do it themselves which doesn't make sense just keep in mind I've been in the Garment clothing sewing business for my whole life like 30 years so it takes a long time to build up but I've been running big factors for about 30 years buying equipment is as easy as writing a check for it it's using it it's getting people trained to be able to use it and then fixing it when it breaks down so it's not just as simple as writing a check and you have a factory you gotta that's step one so as brand owners or teams or somebody that wants to create custom sublimation with you what are potential margins or profitability that they can do by doing business through you my pricing depends on obviously the product and and kind of how many pieces what you can make from it it really depends on who your Market is you know are you selling to the rock stars or the The Rock diggers you know as an example so it really depends on how you're marketing your brand and where it's placed in the price point margin you know you can make a 30 as a minimum if you if you can't make that then you need to boost up your marketing a little bit that would be a safe bet and if you're selling direct to the end consumer you can double your money incredible so in the spirit of this video Jeff yep showed somebody watching go big and do business through you or stay home and do it in a craft method probably that person's already doing the crafting so they're already doing that and maybe you're trying to make a business at your home and sell it and maybe you're having some level of success with it I'd say keep doing that but when you need to get something a little bit more elaborate like what's on the walls it's a great door opener it stands you out with whoever you're selling to saying yes we also do this incredible product so I'd say do both honestly do both continue what you're been doing my advice to someone just trying to get into the business is going getting a heat press that is by far the best way for entry level into the market low investment you can then start marketing this doing the sales then once you need a little bit more special products come talk to people like me to do stuff like this incredible incredible that's what I'd say you heard it here and there's an exclusive discount which we're going to link right down below so when you're ready to go big make sure you check out the description in the links down below we're also going to link the code right here so you guys can go big get a nice discount start doing business with Jeff thank you appreciate it this is an example of a finished Jersey that's sublimation printed and it truly is a custom Jersey finish for your brand if you have a sportswear brand if you have a team if you want to order something custom sublimation printing is the way to go because you can get super creative with your design and it'll be printed all over seamlessly so it doesn't look like it was pieced together or made from home now the cons of going with sublimation printing is the fact that you are limited to graphic designs because you're not designing your own cut and sell product you are limited to the templates that they have available which is a variety of different products so you can get creative with that but it really works best for really good graphic design and sportswear on the other hand when it comes to you making something from home you could truly get creative now obviously we bought this one from Walmart but we just wanted to show you guys the potential of what you can do from with a home-based sublimation cutter and a heat press we did a hollow foil effect which is something that you can't do with a large manufacturer you could do it if you place the orders custom made and you probably had a couple thousand units but if you're just getting started they're not gonna they're not gonna do this for you and we're showing you this because you can go to Goodwill you can go find thrifted clothes and now you can upsell them and make one of one pieces for your customers this is something that you can't do when you Mass produce something so creativity wise doing it from home really works margin wise if you get creative enough you can sell a product with really good margins at a very low cost to you versus going to a sublimation print shop that gives you a pre-template if you're really good with designing go with sublimation Place some orders on stuff sell some units if you're really a designer and a Creator and somebody that wants to make some custom products consider doing it from home so so I hope you guys enjoyed this video where we really broke down if you should go big or stay home and it's completely up to you and if you're a new viewer to our Channel make sure you guys download your free resources and guides which we Linked In the description right down below and if you want to start printing sublimation sportswear on a mass scale make sure you guys check out this video where we dive into those details

Channel: John Santos

Views: 5,017

Keywords: custom jersey from home, how to start a clothing brand, sublimation, sublimation from home, holographic vinyl, heat transfer vinyl, holofoil heat transfer, how to make shorts, custom socks from home, sublimation factory, clothing supplier, sportswear mockup, clothing design, starting a clothing brand, how to start a sportswear brand, how to start a sportswear business, sublimation printing machine, how to sublimate a shirt

Id: 4LGbTOWHw8A

Length: 12min 31sec (751 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 30 2022