Sticker/decal production cost

[500orange]

Hello, we are a high-volume sublimation print shop expanding into custom stickers soon. I am having trouble calculating how much a sticker will really cost us. Could you guys help me out a bit?

The unknown to me is:
- how much time it takes to setup laminator, load the roll...
- how much time it takes to take out thru cut stickers
- how much waste of vinyl is created before starting the printing and after finishing it
- what is the % of machine defects on printer and on cutter
- what is the % of vinyl and laminate defects
- any other unforeseeable costs

 

[victor bogdanov]

All of this depends on a lot of factors but you can easily be under $1 per sqft materials/ink cost and sell that for $15+/sq ft for lower quantities (sticker mule prices for qty of 100) all the way down to $3/sq ft or lower for quantities of 10k , 100k etc

Think of it in terms of rolls, how much does the roll of material cost, how long to print and cut it.


As an example you can take a 60" x 150 ft roll of vinyl and get about 10k 3" x 3" stickers out of it. The rolls costs $200 , 1 hr print time (gotta have the right printer for this speed), 4+ hours cut time (depends on shape etc)

So you have 10,000 that you used $200 vinyl, $100 ink and 5+ hrs of equipment time for. Also will take a few hours of packaging etc. Lets charge $100 for each of those hours and that puts $300 material cost and $500 machine time $300 labor. So you are at 11 cents per sticker making a good profit on that machine time and labor. 11 cents for 3 x 3 stickers qty 10k is a very competitive/wholesale price for stickers. Could go for more retail

 

[500orange]

All of this depends on a lot of factors but you can easily be under $1 per sqft materials/ink cost and sell that for $15+/sq ft for lower quantities (sticker mule prices for qty of 100) all the way down to $3/sq ft or lower for quantities of 10k , 100k etc

Think of it in terms of rolls, how much does the roll of material cost, how long to print and cut it.


As an example you can take a 60" x 150 ft roll of vinyl and get about 10k 3" x 3" stickers out of it. The rolls costs $200 , 1 hr print time (gotta have the right printer for this speed), 4+ hours cut time (depends on shape etc)

So you have 10,000 that you used $200 vinyl, $100 ink and 5+ hrs of equipment time for. Also will take a few hours of packaging etc. Lets charge $100 for each of those hours and that puts $300 material cost and $500 machine time $300 labor. So you are at 11 cents per sticker making a good profit on that machine time and labor. 11 cents for 3 x 3 stickers qty 10k is a very competitive/wholesale price for stickers. Could go for more retail

Hey, thanks for the reply. Agreed about the material and machine costs. Those are easy to calculate and speeds of print/cut are known. What I struggle with is knowing how much labour is needed per sticker - without the packing.

Somebody needs to take roll from printer and insert it into laminator. Then put it into cutter. Then take out stickers… Those are the unknown I want to understand before we invest heavy into this. I know it comes down to optimisation but a ball park would be nice.

Any experience with that?

 

[victor bogdanov]

Hey, thanks for the reply. Agreed about the material and machine costs. Those are easy to calculate and speeds of print/cut are known. What I struggle with is knowing how much labour is needed per sticker - without the packing.

Somebody needs to take roll from printer and insert it into laminator. Then put it into cutter. Then take out stickers… Those are the unknown I want to understand before we invest heavy into this. I know it comes down to optimisation but a ball park would be nice.

Any experience with that?

Load printer, laminator cutter, I can do in under 10 minutes per roll.

Ideally you want to have enough work where you can do whole rolls at a time, way more efficient than doing this 10 min labor to load printer, laminator, cutter for 50 sticker order. I'll even wait until I have a full rolls worth of printing before printing as efficiency drops way off printing less than a full roll

It takes far longer to remove the stickers/pack them up after cutting, this is the most labor intensive step. File prep, adding cut lines etc is also pretty labor intensive unless you invest into some automation to make easier.

 

[Snydo]

When you say "thru cut" do you mean kiss cut or die cut? That will make a MASSIVE difference in cutting time, waste, and blade wear....depending on what type of cutter you use.

 

[somcalmetim]

Most of those variables will depend on you, the skill of your team, the jobs you have to print and the deadlines for the jobs...
Many here have experience with all those things but if your team is just learning the info won't help you much or give unrealistic goals based on different machinery, job sizing and crew skill/experience levels.
It depends on how fast your team does those thing on your machinery, there is no substitute for timing your own test jobs in your own shop.

 

[bob]

Always charge for media unrolled not media actually used. That notwithstanding, this is the basic unit of a good price model. media cost per quantifier. All else is simply overhead and should be allocated based on volume of media required. Be careful of trying to set your price based on how much one copy costs. That way lies madness. Price the job, not each item. Then you divide the cost of the job by the yield, number of copies, if you must know what a single copy costs.

 

[Pauly]

When you say "thru cut" do you mean kiss cut or die cut? That will make a MASSIVE difference in cutting time, waste, and blade wear....depending on what type of cutter you use.

Thru-cut is the proper term for die cut. The stickers cut on a vinyl cutter are not die cut, even thought that's what we call them. As they're not using a die to cut them.

 

[FireSprint.com]

Hello, we are a high-volume sublimation print shop expanding into custom stickers soon. I am having trouble calculating how much a sticker will really cost us. Could you guys help me out a bit?

The unknown to me is:
- how much time it takes to setup laminator, load the roll...
- how much time it takes to take out thru cut stickers
- how much waste of vinyl is created before starting the printing and after finishing it
- what is the % of machine defects on printer and on cutter
- what is the % of vinyl and laminate defects
- any other unforeseeable costs

We sell about 50% of what we buy in material. So a 675sqftft roll of material will yield about 350sqft of sellable product after waste for various reasons. 95% the waste is from the drop skeleton and webbing setup for efficient use of labor and resources.

Load times for full rolls, or partial rolls are minimal and will be less than 10% of your costs assuming you have the volume to load and laminate full rolls. Many of these things can be done in parallel by a small group of operators.

Your biggest costs are going to be front end automation, prepress, and physically picking, sorting, and packaging the stickers. Do your math backwards from what you think you can charge in your market, then figure out how much time per sticker that allows. Then do some dry runs and see if you can punch and pack that many units in the time you give yourself.

 

[500orange]

Thanks for all the advice guys. We got the printer and laminator and have a general idea of costs now.

FireSprint.com thanks for all the videos. I own a similar size print shop by revenue, but for sublimation, and man would be nice if I found your videos a few years earlier. I got a question for you tho. In one of the videos I watched yesterday you mention that packing is part of your production process instead of a separate process. Are there really benefits to this? We have the processes separate because:
- At peak times we can easily onboard new people if we need to teach them just one process (production or packing) instead of two (production + packing).
- Sometimes products need to cool off
- Sometimes customer orders products from different production stations
- It is easier to move products in batch to the packing department vs. pack them at stations and then move parcels to pickup point when courier comes.
How do you handle those?

 

[FireSprint.com]

Thanks for all the advice guys. We got the printer and laminator and have a general idea of costs now.

FireSprint.com thanks for all the videos. I own a similar size print shop by revenue, but for sublimation, and man would be nice if I found your videos a few years earlier. I got a question for you tho. In one of the videos I watched yesterday you mention that packing is part of your production process instead of a separate process. Are there really benefits to this? We have the processes separate because:
- At peak times we can easily onboard new people if we need to teach them just one process (production or packing) instead of two (production + packing).
- Sometimes products need to cool off
- Sometimes customer orders products from different production stations
- It is easier to move products in batch to the packing department vs. pack them at stations and then move parcels to pickup point when courier comes.
How do you handle those?

First, let me say that we’re just barely figuring it all out. It’s a constant effort to get just a little better each day. In no way is this the “Right way”. Just the way we’re experimenting with today.

You make very valid points, and for over 15 years, we loaded jobs onto carts, and wheel them down to shipping to let them take over thet next step. It works. We’ve shipped tens of millions of dollars worth of signs that way.

For us, it’s all about the lean concept of connected work or one piece flow.

There’s a lot of waste in sorting the job correctly off the cutter, then stacking it on a cart, just to have someone else need to move the cart, unload it, and re-familiarize themselves with the job before packing it. Why not have the person who sorts it off the cutter pack it up? Why print multiple job labels, instead of just the final shipping label?

We find shipping to have a very “Sh*t rolls down hill” attitude when production wheels down 3 full carts full of jobs near the end of the day.

If we can’t ship it, did it even matter that we printed it?

By thinking about shipping early on in the process, and connecting it to production, we can help balance workloads to maximize the number of jobs shipped, not just the maximum number printed or cut.

Of course for us, with a $150 average order value with many mixed products, sorting and shipping after the cut is our primary bottleneck.

Back when we were primarily screen printing yard signs, we could ship a days worth of printing in the final few hours of the day without much issue. In this case, it mattered a whole lot less to “Connect the workflow”

 

[kcollinsdesign]

You couldn't have chosen a more competitive market segment! Small, shippable, and requires no installation. Anybody with a $300 PixCut can make stickers.

Printing, laminating, and cutting is the easy part. Sorting, packaging, and shipping will be your bottle neck. File prep will also vary; it's not often you will get professionally produced art optimized for production. Often you have to go back and forth with the customer before the production files are finalized.

The big guys can offer per-sticker prices because they have tens of $millions under their belt and can come up with average prices based on their sales history. In addition, most of their processes are automated, reducing human labor costs, and they have extremely favorable shipping contracts resulting from pre-sorted shipment staging and large volumes.

Do your due diligence before investing, knowing that at the end of the day you won't be able to charge any more that the industry leaders. Their prices are usually published (or easily accessible).

Good luck!