petepaz
New Member
I'm not saying it for the need of what length of time someone needs a job to last or how it's gonna be used..... but from the standpoint of inventory.I hear ya. Guess I'm coming from a different point of view.
When we screen printed heavily back in the day... I was always disgusted of how many blacks we had to stock in order to print to plastics, Cor-X, paper products, enamel and multi- this and that colors.
I'd have 5 or 6 blacks on the shelf at any given time and had to have it according to what job came down the pike..... and it spilled into the whites, yellows, greens and so many other basic colors. We could mix our own custom colors, but then we exhausted that particular type and had to replace a basic color again.
Now, why should I stock 3 or 4 levels of black, red, green, blue or any other colors and have money sitting on the shelves and not in my pocket ??
If you were a high-volume shop, perhaps you'd go through it all fast enough it didn't matter, but even so, if you stock a low grade vinyl in a few basic colors for low end work, you'd have one cost. Then stock the high end and not have all the in-between levels sitting on your shelf rotting away ?? So it costs 65¢ more to do a job site sign then if you had the other stuff on hand, but your inventory costs are still gonna be lower.
Toady, we don't have that problem. We have printers and flatbeds and worry about head heights more than pennies in vinyl to do a job. However, we still do a ton of die-cut for many of the vehicles we do. We have maybe 80 or 90 rolls of H/P vs about 30 or 40 low end [intermediate] for the low end signs. We also keep translucents, refelctive, gold-leafs and specialty vinyls like spreckeld, diamond plate, gradients, etched mosaics and some other crazy chit.
and i agree with your point also. we have like 4 shelving units with 5 shelves filled with silk screen ink (craziness) but i think with the digital days you can get your materials so quick you don't have to stock your shelves with so many materials you just order per job and keep a few items that you use alot in stock. as you do more and more jobs your stock grows but you are saving money along the way. you can order smaller rolls of vinyl for a job unlike some of the inks you can only buy a gallon then you use a qt. or less then the rest sits on the shelf.