How to Save Money on Ink Using Your Cleaning Carts
How to Save Money on Ink Using Your Cleaning Carts
Did you know you can use your cleaning cartridges to save money on ink? Your RICOH Ri uses ink to complete its auto-maintenance. But if you dont plan on printing for awhile, you can save money on maintenance costs by filling your machine with cleaning fluid instead of ink.
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The trick is knowing when it makes sense to flush the printer. Here are the money-saving guidelines:
1. NO WHITE INK printing for 10 days or more?If you do not plan on printing with white ink for more than 10 days, flush the white channels with cleaning fluid. You still can print with CMYK, but will save money on the white ink that normally would be used for automatic maintenance. Remember: You will still need to check your printer daily for errors or maintenance notifications!
2. NO PRINTING AT ALL for a month or more? If you know that you will not be using your printer for a month or more, you will save money on both white and CMYK ink usage if you flush your printer and power it down.
3. LEAVING YOUR PRINTER UNATTENDED for 10 days or more? More of a safety measure than a tip for saving money, its best to flush your printer if you plan on leaving it completely unattended for 10 days or more. This will protect the printer from power surges or issues that can arise from having the machine accidentally powered off or left with unresolved errors while you are away.
4. BONUS TIP: You will get 3 flushes out of every cleaning cartridge. Always keep a set of cleaning cartridges on hand in case you need to put your printer into storage or you run into issues with your machine.
Looking to get into DTG? Learn more about why the RICOH Ri was named best DTG printer by independent experts.
The Easy Way to Save Money on Screen Printing Ink
Save Money on Screen Printing Ink By Standardizing Your Inks: Heres How
Printavo is simple shop management software. We help you streamline your business, keep jobs moving forward and your team on the same page.
Want to save money on screen printing ink?
The answer is simple: standardize your ink selection. Ill show you how.
Screen printers love to show off their collections of custom-mixed inks. Youll see these colorful pictures on any print shops Instagram:
A lot of print shops brag about Pantone matching. They show off hundreds of small cups of customized ink sitting in their shop. They advertise that they can mix any custom color.
But at my shop, we dont.
Dont do a lot of Pantone matching!
Pantone matching doesnt make a lot of sense for the average screen printing shop that mostly prints for local businesses, organizations, teams, churches, and schools.
Custom Pantone matching can turn into a profit-eating monster.
Without a clear policy for when you will and wont do Pantone matching, heres what happens:
Low productivity rates.
More misprints.
Unhappy customers.
More expensive ink and labor costs.
Waste: space, ink, time
We will mix custom colors if we have to! But we dont offer it right off the bat. If Im trying to win over a high-profile client, I will definitely let them know that we can do custom Pantone matching.
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Im much more likely to advertise our online stores than Pantone matching. That adds real value and custom color matching isnt part of our primary business model.
Our details for custom color matching are in fine print at the bottom of our standard ink menu For orders over 100 pieces, we will mix custom colors. Otherwise, we charge $100 per custom color.
That $100 for Pantone color matching does two things: it stops people from asking about color matching and it makes color matching more valuable.
Note: there are some very real exceptions here! Print shops like Night Owls and Printed Threads specialize in Pantone matching. They make it a core component of their business because theyre extremely good at it. Custom colors are part and parcel of their services not a tacked-on extra.
Reduce the number of screen printing inks in your shop
Cody from Matsui is an ink mixing pro after years of practice.Custom ink mixing is an art.
Learning to mix ink correctly and consistently requires significant investment in the form of research and development. Typically, only one or two shop employees can mix inks up to professional standards.
No matter which ink mixing system, Pantone book, or special trick you use ink mixing requires incredible attention to detail. Even if you carefully follow ink recipes, your mixtures may require fudging (read: trial-and-error) to get the perfect color match.
Every screen printer should understand that ink colors will appear differently depending on the chemistry of the ink, garment, and curing process.
Navy can look very different according to:
Brand of ink
Type of ink
Type of t-shirt
Underbase or no underbase
DTG, screen print, or transfer
The light the color is inspected under
And a huge variety of other variables.
Reducing waste is the easiest way to save money on screen printing ink.
There is a lot of waste when you mix custom inks.
Heres how you lose money when you go overboard with custom colors and inks:
- You mix too much screen printing ink.
Typically, you will mix more than you need (since combining fractions of a gram is very difficult).
- You purchase too much screen printing ink.
Your actual ink consumption doesnt go up, but you do wind up keeping more on-hand because it
INKBANK supply professional and honest service.
seems
like youre using more ink
- You waste space.
Shelves and shelves of custom ink take up space you can use for revenue-driving activities.
- Your standards vary
You may be within one shade on one job, but way off on the next. Unless you have strict quality control and expensive color matching equipment, your actual color matching can easily vary from job to job.
- which leads to more spoilage and misprints.
Your team miscommunicates about a color and the entire run is ruined. Customers may be extremely discerning about color matches and reject jobs you judged as good enough. Worse still, Ive heard of shops re-printing an order because the colors werent right only to discover the customer could care less!
- Your R&D budget balloons.
If youre not budgeting for some research and development, youre making a mistake but if youre financing an on-site education in Pantone matching, your R&D budget is likely out of control.
- Your sales, design, and production departments struggle to communicate about colors.
Sales is the first step in the production process, right? What they do filters down to artists, then to your production staff. If sales, design, and production cant talk about colors easily and effortlessly, that is wasted time!
Over time, there will be thousands of dollars of ink sitting in your shop, taking up space, never to be used again.
Every time you add another color to your library, you add complexity to your print shop.
You create more options, more choices, and more opportunities to make mistakes. Your sales team struggle to define the exact color, your designers scramble to figure out the color requirements, your production team walk around the shop and struggle to find the right inks.
Custom Pantone matching creates picky and demanding customers
Do you believe your customers demand unique Pantone matches?
With a few exceptions, this simply isnt the case.
Customers (and even experienced printers) cant tell the difference between Pantone C and C once its actually on a shirt, so why create two options? Its just Navy!
Is there a difference? Yes. Does it matter to 95% of customers? No.Giving too many options to your customers creates analysis paralysis. You can have any color you want! sounds greatuntil it comes time to actually choose colors.
This process slows their decision making. It introduces complexity into your production process. And it has one negative effect thats very hard to deal with: unhappy customers because of buyers remorse.
Custom color matching can make customers unhappy, even if their order went exactly to plan. Heres how this works: your customer thinks, What if it was a slightly better shade of blue? They imagine a better product, or wish theyd gone with different colors. Buyers remorse sets in.
Second-guessing doesnt happen if they are told, right from the start, This is the blue we print in our shop.
Cut out waste: creating a standard chart of screen printing ink colors
Many people settle for eliminating the waste that everyone recognizes as waste. But much remains that simply has not yet been recognized as waste or that people are willing to tolerate. from the Toyota Production Systems core tenets
At Campus Ink, we have 44 stock colors and 8 specialty inks.
How much simpler and faster is this? A lot.We chose these colors because they represent the most common shades of the most common colors that we print. Its extremely rare that we cant find a way to match these colors to 95% of the artwork we do for screen printing.
The interesting thing? 44 colors are way more than enough to satisfy our most selective university customers.
Lets talk about how and why this system works (and how you can do it too).
How to standardize your screen printing inks
To standardize your ink colors today, schedule the afternoon to go through your ink collection and purge the waste. Dont worry about those small cups of custom colors start fresh.
Create a color card with the standard ink colors youll offer to customers.
Then, create a custom swatch in Adobe Illustrator (or Corel).
You can use this swatch in two powerful ways:
Install it on your designers computers.
Offer it to customers that do their own artwork.
Then, print a large version of your swatch and hanging it throughout your shop.
Sales staff, artists, and production staff should all have an easily accessible way to glance at your standard inks.
From there, youll want to name your inks with simple color names. This seems silly but it cuts down on confusion internally and externally.
Each color weve chosen has been given a unique name that we chose. Some are fun (Tootie Fruity Pink, Turkey Brown) while others are straight to the point (Illini Orange, F*ck Cancer Pink). You can use these names to put some personality into the process its a lot more fun to talk about Tootie Fruity Pink than Pantone Pink C.
This makes it super easy to refer to inks whether were dealing with sales staff, designers, or production workers. Everyone uses the same vocabulary and simple names to refer to ink colors.
This is the entirety of our ink room at Campus Ink!Standards equal efficiency and simplicity
Ive traveled across the country and seen print shops of every size have thousands of dollars of unused ink sitting in their shops.
You can absolutely make a niche out of custom Pantone matching but its not something every print shop needs. Its much easier, faster, and better for your team to use a standardized palette of inks.
Standards and documentation for every activity in your shop sales, artwork, production make autonomous and engaged employees. Ultimately, standards save money by reducing waste.
To save money on screen printing ink, take the following steps to standardize colors in your shop:
Audit your ink collection.
Throw away old custom mixed inks.
Identify the most common colors you print.
Make a swatch of your most common colors.
Align your ink choices with the brands of ink you use.
Name and label your colors.
Create an Adobe Illustrator swatch for your shop (and offer it to customers if needed).
Print your color swatch and hang it throughout your shop.
Consider offering custom matching at a premium.
Guide your customers toward better designs.
The amazing SHIRT KONG embarked on this journey. They report that its made things much simpler from sales to art.
About the author: Steven Farag is co-owner ofSteven Farag is co-owner of Campus Ink in Champaign, IL. He regularly writes for Printavo and works closely with us to offer feedback, advice, and guidance for how to make Printavo even better. Stevens focus on improving processes and workflow as well as a relentless pursuit of new productivity-boosting tools and automations has made Steven a leader among the newest generation of print shop owners. Watch his presentation about managing Millennials from Printavos PrintHustlers Conf here
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