Materials Markup A useful screen printing industry standard is to markup items by at least 50% of your cost. If your garment costs $1.00, you would simply divide by 0.50 to calculate your margin goal of 50%. This means the component price of the shirt alone would be $2.00.

Screen printing has a lot of setup and breakdown involved. To overcome the cost of creating screens and then setting up those screens on press (as well as breaking down and reclaiming the screens), screen printers need to print a lot of shirts to make the job profitable.

Adobe Illustrator is the industry's leading vector generation software. It's powerful and widely used. Illustrator has a steep learning curve for beginners. But if you're serious about screen printing, there's a rich collection of videos and other resources available to learn Illustrator.

Screen printing is the process of transferring a stencilled design onto a flat surface using a mesh screen, ink and a squeegee. Fabric and paper are the most commonly screen-printed surfaces, but with specialised inks it's also possible to print onto wood, metal, plastic, and even glass.