I'd been thinking about starting my own business for several years, but never really knew what I wanted to do until just recently. After a lot of careful consideration, I decided to sell t-shirts on eBay and from my own website. I've always had a knack for coming up with funny slogans and cool graphics, and just figured that this kind of thing would be right up my alley. Handling the online portion of the business was easy, but finding affordable screen printing equipment turned out to be more of a challenge.
Most of the screen printing equipment I looked at was simply too big and too expensive for my purposes. I wanted something that I could set up in my garage and that would be able to handle a reasonable number of shirts, sweatshirts, and jackets per month. If my business did well, I would definitely think about upgrading my screen printing equipment. But I didn't want to spend too much on a machine in case sales turned out to be much slower than anticipated.
The first decision I had to make was whether I wanted to go with new screen printing equipment or if used stuff would suit my purposes. Then, I had to decide which accessories I wanted and how I was going to get my screen printing equipment delivered and set up. Once I determined the answers to these questions, I started calling industrial suppliers in my area to see if anyone had the kind of screen printing equipment I wanted. Since I live in a rather remote place and wanted a small, used machine, I didn't have any luck with suppliers in my area. I was forced to try calling some suppliers in neighboring states and finally got a promising lead.
Before closing on the deal, I checked online to see what the average price of similar screen printing equipment was at different stores around the country. I didn't plan on spending more than I wanted to just because there was only one dealer to buy from. When I was online, I found many screen printing equipment catalogs and resources that helped me determine how much the machine was worth. Once I was satisfied that I was getting a fair deal, I went ahead with the purchase.
I'm happy to say that my screen printing equipment is already set up and cranking out great t-shirts and other apparel. My sales figures are just about where I hoped they'd be at this point, and it looks like I'll be able to make a real go of my business thanks in large part to starting off with the right screen printing equipment.
