Secrets of a 7-Figure Screen Printing Business

fire in the hole oh wow that is awesome that's it wanna know how you too can start a on-demand print business and become a trusted vendor for big name brands like amazon and microsoft well artem opened logo unlimited back in 2014 and their company has been growing every year in this episode we're going to talk to artem who went into the corporate merchandising business after being a top export of apples to russia artem grew logo unlimited to a level where amazon and microsoft has his company on their preferred vendor list when clients come in and when they see this they go bananas let's go over real quick about the must-have equipment to get going in this business in this video he'll share what you can do to bring a very unique touch to your business how you too can start a print on demand business and what makes logo unlimited stand out in the crowd so that would be my number one money making machine that's what we're doing right now man this is incredible stuff i just started with zero clients with zero machines guys later in this video we have an incredible offer for you from our sponsor shopify if you sell any products online you should definitely jump on this opportunity so stay tuned for that and without further ado let's go meet artem and share his incredible story i hear him working just out here right now artem good morning so i'll call you back bye she's working always good good to meet you good to meet you let's do this you guys we're here with artem the owner and founder of logo unlimited artem thanks for joining us my pleasure tell us a little bit about your story why and when you started logo unlimited and yeah what else you can share with us everything i'll share everything so i started the business uh about seven years ago i went into apparel because i like apparel i think i know what looks good i just got tired of people doing the left chest embroidery and i'm like there's so much more that you can do with garments that was my plan like to show people that we can do more than just live chest embroidery [Music] let's go over real quick about the must-have equipment to get going in this business i know there's different avenues but what would you focus on bare minimum equipment and so on everything it like you said everything depends on where where you want to start when i started my business i wanted to go for high-tier clients i wanted to make premium garments everything depends i mean you can start as easy as buying a heat press from ebay okay and do a vinyl heat transfers and believe it or not before like even five years ago they they suck now you can get a lot of different style heat transfers you can get vinyl heat transfers you can even get embroidered heat transfer that you just hit apply and those are pretty cheap to get yeah exactly exactly so it just depends on what you want to do and which direction you want to go if you do uh sports teams for example all you need is a heat press and a little plotter if you want to do heat transfers yourself to cut them out you buy a little plotter cut them yourself with them press them boom done okay so everything depends the only thing that i would say you know embroidery machines they're expensive this the gmas that i have uh they're expensive they're japanese machines yeah they're in industrial so we're industrial right it's not a garage type operation so i would say don't go cheap if you do if you are planning to spend money buy quality equipment [Music] tell me a little bit about how you set up the showroom so we moved in this place so we used to be in kirkland tottenham lake uh our shop was uh i believe for around 2 500 square feet okay we started out growing it fast and i'm like oh my god we need a bigger shop so we found this shop uh which is uh around 5 000 square feet warehouse okay and it was just a plain open floor kind of concept i know and when i set up a showroom i kind of started here first and then i started worrying about all the equipment because this sells this yeah when clients come in they don't necessarily care of how it's made they want to see the end product and when they see this our capabilities they go bananas so this is important if you extremely we're going to get into this business you need to have a pretty solid showroom for sure for sure 100 and we actually working on probably we're going to be moving from here soon again again in three years so hopefully in the 10 000 square foot facility so we did somebody just told me so you did three so it's doubled first three years 25 seconds three years five and now we hopefully will get in the 10 000 square foot facility buy more equipment and pretty much do the same only on a larger scale how long did it take you to break even on your initial investment and where is your revenue monthly today so probably as soon as i started as soon as i started going direct that was probably when i actually started making money because when i did the wholesale i did not so that was i guess three and a half years ago wow okay yeah so three and a half years into it you know exactly exactly but it's because i went the wrong route right you win or you learn yeah where's your revenue now though uh i mean it's all over the place uh but we are about i think we're about 170 thousand dollars a month right now wow but my next year goal is i mean we have to double so i need to hire more people we need to double because right now i do everything myself i mean i sell i set up jobs i do quality control i do a lot of things on my own yeah and i can only burn out soon exactly i can work only for so many hours a day in terms of skills that you need for this what would you say for you were some of the most critical skills that helped you get up and going and an expert help well i'm still learning as i go i think for me the number one was creative everything else kind of i'm learning as i go so you were a creative would you say before you got into not really not really really i don't think so i never it never show i i don't know but yeah not really i don't think so okay so it's just i started doing a lot of research of what retail brands are doing as far as the decorations placements and so on and so forth and i just pick the you know the styles that i like and kind of i try to show them to my clients and tell them hey we can do your logo done the same way screen printed embroidered anything you want uh dbos only with your logo okay and we'll talk about print on demand later because i think that's something that you're working on and we want to share with our audience um besides the creative skill what else would you tell our audience who are interested in this business yeah skills that will help experiences that will help get going experiences i mean obviously if you're a graphic designer helps i mean that's the core of all of it because you need to set up the logos in screen printing you need to separate the colors so graphic design would be my number one that's about it i mean just a will that's what i have when i when i started this all i have is a will and will to survive exactly and i just started with zero clients with zero machines and i just said this is what i want to do and i started doing it and that's it so can you print some t-shirts for us with our logo on it unfortunately not you guys uh so our minimum starts at 48 pieces okay and but let me show you a machine that is actually one the only one in the northwest as far as i know and it's just a few in north america and this was actually my first machine that i bought and it's this laser cost me hundred thousand dollars wow and this was my first very first laser so there's no colors here or anything it's no color so what it does it pretty much is going to take your substrate color and it's just going to make a dollar darker got it so what it does it pretty much melts the top layer off so we're set up with your logo here so it's a 80 watt laser so i can laser edge pretty much on anything so we're using only 17 of that power 1500 is 50 is the speed so it's 1500 millimeters per second well i don't know how many inches but it's fast you'll see it and how many runs we want to do one so what do we do here this here is the center of the of your logo got it so it's easy for us to manipulate the garment and find the proper placement so let's go let's say this is what we want to do this is our placement right here okay we're done with the preview hit exit and then safety goggles on not really kidding uh fire in the hole but it's something we could look at yeah for sure oh wow that is pretty cool that is awesome that's it that's it so here's your five inch logo meet in two seconds [Music] speaking on the corporate clients what how are you going after them what can you share with us so there is a company online it's called seamless ai so it's pretty much a lengthened on steroids okay so on this platform you can actually narrow down the search of the people that you're looking for so for example for us when we go after a bigger corporate clients we go we look for marketing department we're looking for hr we're looking for sales or purchasing we look we're going after everyone so and on this platform you can create custom lists companies positions and you'll get their names phone numbers emails date of birth so no no no social security number yeah but you'll get pretty much everything you need and then what we do okay we used another platform called outreach that's um i forget what's the proper wording for it but it's a drip campaign got it okay so you'll send the email so you create a list of 10 000 emails and it will send different email to those contacts every week and you set up your campaigns on what you want to say you know you want to introduce yourself on the email one and the email too you say hey i haven't heard from you i really want to make something cool for you you know yeah so and so forth so you can create those drip campaigns so that's what we're doing right now man this is incredible stuff how important is a website for your business talk to us about that a little bit that is the most important part because that's the face of your company and if you have a crappy website people will assume that that's your quality of your work so i within 70 years i well i'm redesigning my website again right i think i'm changing yet this my fourth time so i always try to be a step ahead of the trend and just showcase because my goal with the website is for an executive to go on the website and go whoa though these guys know what they're doing so super important are you selling any merchandise online not yet now i'm working on i'm building a portal right now it's a process because it takes a second because everything is custom built but online is important especially right now during panagemic right there is no in-person purchases there is everything is done via zoom so having a e-commerce platform is super important okay well on that note you guys today's sponsor for the video is shopify the number one trusted e-commerce platform in the world more than 1.7 people business owners trust shopify to take care of all their online needs so if you guys are watching this and you're selling products online give shopify a try the link is in the description below 14 day free trial [Music] where do most of your customers find out about you today and what's the best form of advertisement that you've been really investing in ah so customers most of my clients customers find me on google out of all places i don't get much business out of facebook or instagram google is the most important uh source for me so get those reviews they're important because people are looking at their reviews and google is the best for us besides google reviews what specifically are you doing on google how much are you spending on that and i'm not yeah i'm not doing any advertisement on google at all you're not okay not at all just have a business page set up essentially yeah absolutely yeah i do have a business speech i update my picture so i add pictures to my business page every week so that one is important i don't know how many i have but maybe around five to the well i think i'm close to 10 000 pictures online so those do work but you don't have to spend money on google i mean i will eventually uh once i figure out how to do it properly uh but i will start doing ads on google facebook instagram not yet because it's not i don't think my clients are in on the instagram because again i'm going after corporate clients so i feel like facebook would be better for me well show us the rest of the shop uh we'll follow you around and yeah so this is our production area mm-hmm so this is our uh one for now uh screen print press uh this is made by company rock out of portugal we believe they're one of the best screenprint press manufacturers so and i like to buy good quality equipment you don't cheap out what is this worth then what's the cost uh this one i believe uh about 75 000 the one that i'm looking at right now is double that is it just bigger more complicated bigger more colors more colors exactly so this is considered eight color press the one that i'm looking at is going to be 14 color press and it's going to be double the size so when they come in shipped is it like an ikea assembly or you got it on the instructions no we don't do anything they send the professionals to do they install luckily how much did you invest to start logo unlimited where did the money go and what's the biggest expense in getting going well for me because i went a different route than everyone else my first purchase and the most expensive one was the laser that i showed you so that one was a hundred thousand dollars as soon as i bought that laser i quickly learned that i need more equipment the second piece of equipment that i bought was embroidery machine six hat i bought it used but i bought a good quality machine and then i just bought the office equipment tables computers and so on and so forth and that's it how much total would you say to get going i wouldn't say you know the route that i took was the smartest sword device you know so uh i mean total probably i would send about 150 000 okay to start with but there are way different ways of how you can do this better and smarter talk to us about the design aspect so clients come in with their logo you print it or do you have a design group within the business that then goes through that process what's the price difference too to you uh no big price difference so upstairs that's where our my designers are okay so we do we do everything in-house everyone wants to work from home and for us it has to be in-house right i mean we can't we can't work from home it's just because you need to see the process you need to see the end product you need to make on the adjustments on the fly and working remote is not an option so you but you do print if i bring you a logo you print that absolutely yeah so that's mo most of the times that's how it starts okay i'm looking for a black shirt here's my logo i want it on the full front or left chest and that's it and that's that and that's what you get how much more do you make if you end up designing everything from a to z do you focus on that uh we i mean we do everything depends on the client and if yeah everything depends on the client on the size size of the company right so we do offer the uh design services smaller companies we do charge if the orders not a lot right so we do charge them hourly for the design larger companies is just part of our full package because larger companies would come in and buy t-shirts hats jackets beanies you know everything yeah the hundred thousands wow okay thousands so usually we would offer it as if just a little perk what's the hourly rate on the design uh anywhere from 65 to 80 okay what were some unexpected challenges some difficulties you had to go through and if you could go back and start it again would you do anything different the number one challenge for me which it didn't scare me at all i didn't have any clients at all okay i thought at that point there was a easy route to do a wholesale meaning uh having a middleman between me as a decorator and the end user so those type of companies they already have their client base built right so all they do they ship me let's say t-shirts and ask me to print for them i did that for about three and a half years there is no money in it it's horrible unless you have a big shop and you have 100 employees when they send you a garment you know a t-shirt you print one color imprint on it it's two dollars there is no money in two dollars the money is in the in the garment but at that time i wish when i started i just went direct and started building my own customer base that's the only and the best way [Music] arthur in terms of customers walking in getting t-shirts printed on other apparel what else can they get at the shop and a lot of our viewers love to know what's the most popular thing that goes to your business and the most profitable well so we're a one-stop shop our goal is to provide everything from stickers laptop stickers to carve up to backpacks coolers i mean anything you name it we we can do it all pretty much we don't want our customers to buy something else from other companies we won't bring we want to capture 100 of their business okay and that's our goal certain things we do in-house certain things we outsource we just underservices that we outsource we don't make as much but we still make profit what are the items that have the highest profits versus lowest profits as well private margins everything i mean t-shirts would be probably the least expensive item that you can get profit margins i mean everything we try to do is nothing less than 50 really nothing that's across the board of all your oh yeah and t-shirts i mean t-shirts it depends on the product right so there is a lot of variables like reprinting right now a six color job 200 t-shirts right so it depends uh there is profit in everything obviously it just everything depends on how fast you can turn the job got it so the most profitable for us would be our big laser that i showed you and you saw the five inch logo i can produce in two seconds right and for that logo i would charge five bucks wow so that would be my number one money making machine where do you get all the merchandise the the teas and stuff and for those watching right now who want to find the best value on where to buy this stuff what would you tell them so there are it just depends on your value volume okay of how much you do there are plenty of online companies uh that sell to smaller shops so i buy direct from wholesalers because i'm doing it on on a larger scale somewhat so there are plenty of companies online that do sell wholesale and there are i mean you can get pretty much anything you want wholesale from patagonia well paragonia not anymore they stop selling wholesale but you'll get your new airs uh eddie bowers nikes adidas pumas i mean you can get pretty much everything everything is out there the only thing that you need to have is you have to be a member of two associations one is called asi and the second one is called ppai if you're a member of either of these two associations you can set up well you'll need a resale permit but you can set up a wholesale account and buy everything wholesale and they won't limit you at minimum a thousand orders no there are no minimums they'll they'll just charge you more got it okay yeah so the more you buy the more you buy it the better price you get exactly yeah what are your business challenges today as a business owner yeah and are they new to 2021 or is that kind of a yearly thing everything is new to to 2021 right now we have all kinds of issues shortages of garments t-shirts hats there are no hats no good quality hats i have clients asking for trucker hats they don't exist wow so how are you handling these issues in these struggles spending so usually well before this craziness i would spend five minutes to place an order now i spent 45 to an hour just searching the internet finding the blanks yeah it's a lot of time has your ordering change so like are you ordering way ahead of time way more than you used to like no we don't pre-order anything because everything we do is custom and we don't have much space to store anything nor the finances nor the capital to store those products here if i did i would probably store trucker hats right about now uh but yeah no it's just you spend time you contact your vendors you talk to them find out the etas and kind of go from there but i mean we're losing business right now because we can't provide we can't get the government you guys if you aren't already subscribed to our channel you're missing incredible content so take a second hit the like button hit the subscribe and the bell so that you don't miss any videos and let's get back into the interview all right let's talk about corporate customers and reviews how important are they which sites do you focus on so as i mentioned before uh google is number one for me okay even for corporate or even for corporate yes everyone is on google everyone is looking and reviews are the most important thing they want to make sure that the whatever project they might have goes to the right company that can deliver on time and provide the quality getting reviews can be difficult what process do you have in place to ask for that that's it please please yeah review exactly but usually yeah i mean all we do you know after i make a delivery i would have five minutes with them talk about you know whatever they might have in the future and i would say hey do you mind if i'll send you a link can do you mind leaving me a quality review and nobody ever said no okay that's it you guys if you're in this business we'd love to know what you're doing to get reviews please comment below it's a value to all our viewers fans and we always respond to our comments so thank you for that obviously super important to have all your apparel with everything that you provide in terms of services tell me about this as well what is what is this and what's going on here uh so this or just some of the promotional products that we do as well so pretty much all of our customers corporate customers not corporate they'll require promotional apparel so they come in to us for custom apparel and then they would ask hey can you do lanyards can you do water bottles can you do pen pencils napkins i mean we've done it all glassware so this is what you see here this top portion here is some of the cool patches that i'm slowly introducing to us market and again just different products that we've done so this is a single use hand sanitizer packets and you're the one printing on them obviously uh correct yes so we've done we've done actually all of these projects here so the idea like i said it's one stop shop for everything how many employees do you have what do you pay them any tips advice on finding the right talent and hiring the right people i think we have a team of eight okay maybe seven i'm not sure so people are your most important asset because you can do everything yourself so you have to trust your people with everything i mean we i mean we don't pay anyone fifteen dollars even if you start with us uh as a helper where you where we start at 18 and then i mean because we're growing everyone is like yes as we grow as a company everyone will grow with it right obviously uh if you're a screen print operator or embroidered graphic designer obviously those will pay more those positions start around 25 okay and then we just see right if you suck you leave and we'll find you know somebody else until until ever all parties involved are comfortable right because i want employees to be an asset to a company not a liability and that's the most important thing talk to us a little bit about print on demand and how you grow your business to to be that or if that's your pursuit or not and just overall what is what does that look like for non-demand uh it's not yet it's in the works possibly maybe it's just when you print on demand you require a different type of setup so we we do print on demand but we set our minimums higher than the most gotcha so our minimum is 48 pieces so it's completely different print imprint process so for example for the t-shirts is the process called direct to garment it's pretty much a desktop printer and it prints on your garment one of those nicer printers they cost about 50k and you can print the one off uh you know and printing on papers and printing pretty much exactly so and there are companies out there that's specializing in that in that service the margins are completely different because when i sell a shirt is you know you order 48 shirts you know one color print let's say i'll say sell a shirt for 10 bucks and still make profit but when you print a one off you sell it full retail and that shirt will cost 30 bucks if you order the chrome online company so the profits are way up exact demand but requires a big much bigger completely different setup exactly share with us the evolution of becoming a preferred vendor with amazon and microsoft those are some big names for sure and it took us a second even i already knew some people we will already selling to amazon and microsoft so they have a system if you sell anything under ten thousand dollars they can pay with the credit card okay so you don't even have to be in their system you don't have to be a preferred vendor once you go above 10 000 they have to issue a purchase order in order for that you have to be in the system and that's a process of its own okay so funny thing what happened to me i got to purchase well i got an order from microsoft there was about 50 or 60 thousand dollar order and they said hey you're not preferred but we want you to make our swag so we'll figure out the way maybe we'll just break it down between six com employees and we'll each put 10 grand on each card and well after i produced that did not happen and i'm like oh my god like i'm 60 000 out and they can't pay me they're like their boss said no you can't pay him with the credit card it's too much money it has to be on the po so that kind of was fortunate enough for me because they had to do everything in their powers to set me up as a preferred vendor and then boom i got on their list you just need to find the right person beg him yeah buy him drinks take him out for dinner whatever it takes old-school tricks exactly yeah [Music] artem how do you verify the quality of your products and how important is that for your reputation this is one of the most important thing for us quality that's our reputation so quality is always our number one and and highest priority so the way we verify just we train our people for certain things to look for in the print or in the embroidery and that's it quality control do you do that personally is there like an official process before you hand it over to a client deliver it there is no official uh there is no official process unfortunately i mean we don't have it yet but we will set it up because it's that important it's just we don't have it on a piece of paper yet i do check everything because when i make a delivery i want to make sure when the client opens the box there's no surprises and i don't want to stand there and make excuses in terms of printing on earbuds and little pieces what did you need to do in terms of equipment what's the process different like yeah so as of right now we outsource that type of printing so it's called pad printing it's pretty much like ink ups and it just stamps on the cup on the airpod i mean on anything you don't have the ability to do that actually i just bought that equipment but we were so busy and we are so busy we just don't have time to even turn the machine on and try to figure out how to use it okay so it's been sitting here for a good six months so you can print on all of these hard goods but the reason why i bought it and i'm gonna use it the most is to do a private custom neck labels i see so i can you know all the garments they you have a neck label it says where it's made the fabric content i'm going to rip those out and stamp something with logo unlimited so when people wear it brand they can exactly i want to i want to start branding the apparel that i sell to corporate clients to all of my clients and you can do that right legally you can brand whatever goes to your shop yeah well yeah it's a yeah it's i mean it's my garment i bought it i can do anything i want with it so that's awesome that's what i'm planning to do and a lot of companies do so when you have the a lot of online customers do they rebrand the garments right so it looks like it's their own it looks more premium i guess right all right blitz time with artichome artem 10 seconds or so to answer each question and these questions are from our deer fans thank you guys for submitting them the first one is from garrett stevenson how can we get started he asks what do you recommend just start just start like me just make that first step start and then you'll figure out and buy that machine and buy the heat press yeah i mean just that's the easiest way to start buy a heat press sell it online this is from aiden baracos thanks for your question artem how do you network to build clientele during the pandemic impossible impossible that's it okay yeah that's the truth it was pretty difficult um this is from c.s smith thank you for your question how did you manage to attract an investor or a bank when you got started don't have any of those it's all my i make money and reinvest money okay uh this is from genki and a lot of and a lot of credit card debt those can be handy gank is con how do you handle the pricing the design part into the products you sell at them so we have formulas for different uh types of decoration but everything depends on the project because you have your quantity of the garments is it 24 shirts or it's 2 400 shirts everything depends so everything is custom and we have three tiers we have i call it you know you have bronze silver gold and we call it friends and family people we like and retail thank you for that and this is the last question from m m vex uh artem what was it like to make your first hundred thousand it wasn't exciting for a second no more and then because once you go through that you're like okay million dollars right so yeah exactly so now we're getting closer to two next one is going to be five that's awesome yeah so yeah it's always next goal right so once you reach the first one you're like cool not enough let's go [Music] do you read business books if so what's your favorite and to segment into that question what business resources are out there for small businesses right now that they can go to and learn in this industry so i don't read as much as i like to i listen to books when i'm making so i make deliveries right always i never ship anything to my clients they make deliveries personally okay so when i'm in the car in driving to seattle traffic so that's what i do i listen to books and the last book i've listened to was called storybrand which is extremely powerful book of how to set up your web uh website so i actually re redesigning my website right now based of just listening to that book because everything this uh writers talks about valuable 100 so in very good book okay so i don't read much like i said but everything i get all of my information from online uh facebook and most uh probably number one because you have groups for everything for embroidery screen printing promotional products apparel you name it uh groups are out there people are help helpful it's it's all out there you just need to find it so facebook is a place to go and learn something new about the embroidery business if you don't know something for sure 100 i have i know one guy yeah i know one guy who runs the shop right now screen printing shop and embroidery he does everything on his own and he'll learn it by watching youtube videos i'm like i mean it was insane but it's possible it's doable [Music] all right artem what would be an incredible hack that you're ready to share with our viewers for this industry this business that can make or break them yeah so i my recommendation would be to find a door opener because the most important thing if you're a screen printer there's thousands of us out there so you need to be different you need to have this something that will set you apart from your competition so i would find that i would perfect it until it's beyond perfect and i would push that first and then everything else defined door opener though uh so for me for example i have multiple lucky for me i have multiple door openers so that big laser is number one because i'm the only one in pacific northwest that does laser etching and garments so when i go in the meeting i create a sample box and i give the person that i'm meeting with a bunch of garments bunch of things with their logo on it and when i do laser-etched sample everyone's goes bananas they're like oh my god we've never seen anything like that and my second door opener is dbos if this is where you make a magnesium plate i have a big hydraulic press and it just pretty much stamps the logo into a garment so that's another one and that one i like now much better is because it has this high-end feel to it that's something that you would see like if you go to neiman marcus and you would see something d-boss you're like oh my god that's money nice and so door opener is would be my number one for sure to wrap up the interview any advice for our viewers just in general business advice entrepreneur advice what comes to mind two three things one thing just take risks i mean i know it's a cliche but i mean yeah i mean that's what i do every day i mean i like in my setup and my business i believe in it hundred percent even though when i was not making money i knew that there is a potential in it and i knew that i could grow this business so taking risks taking on credit you know was part of it and which now it's a burden kind of right that you have to pay back the banks and high interest rate credit credit cards but i still believe in it so by taking risks i whatever money i make i just invest in buying more new equipment just again to do as much as possible in-house because i know when we do everything in-house we control the quality right when you outsource it you're in mercy of you know that company that prints a t-shirt for you so at the end of the day if they screw something up it's your name on the line so for me my reputation is the most important thing okay so take risks take risks and do things right thank you arden yes it's been great my pleasure appreciate it you guys i hope you enjoyed this episode logo unlimited with the owner artem what an incredible story hope you took out a lot take a second to like subscribe and hit that bell so that you don't miss any of our amazing content we do this for you thank you

2021-11-17 21:08

Other news