Heat Transfer with Transfer Express for T-Shirts

Our first T-shirt we got for SecondMoonshot was from Zazzle and ended up costing about $25 per shirt. That made it cost prohibitive for any quantity and I have been meaning to dabble into printing my own T-shirts. Originally I was going to go all-in and get my own heat press, but turns out my neighbor just bought one for similar reasons and he rarely uses it. 

After digging around to find where I was going to get the transfers, I ended up with TransferExpress.com. I thought about getting one of those CriCut machines, but really not ready to jump into that boat as not really interested in doing much more nor making a business out of it. Their editing tools are excellent and support all the image types we needed. I opted to not mess with a proof and just ordered 25 gang sheets (sheets which you can cut into the individual components). 



These are 12” x 15” sheets or thereabouts and I have 2 big logos with tag line for the back of T-Shirts and about 9 smaller logos and just the name for the front breast area. For all the sheets, they cost me about $125 after shipping. These were labeled as the “Goof Proof” series…just what I need.

As soon as I got them in, I fired up the heat press to the target temperature and started pressing. While my positioning needs some tweaking, they came out perfect starting with the first one. Super easy and very cost effective. Even if I decide to get a press later, it would pay for itself after a dozen or two shirts. 

All the time really goes into the design of the gang sheets (assuming your go that route vs. a single design per sheet). I was fortunate to have Carrie, my VP of Branding, work beside me to tweak the images as we were designing. These are single color (i.e. cheapest) which was actually all I needed although may get some black ones at a future date, but for time being can just focus on darker shirts. 

We found we can often dig up new T-shirts at GoodWill and other thrift stores with tags for $2 or $3 or any kind of shirt or apparel really and sometimes I see lots of them at auction as well.






John

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