"Am I charging enough?" is the most common question a print shop owner asks, and the published answers are the least useful data available. A single average blends a contract printer in a low-wage market with a retail shop in an expensive city. Your own history is a far better benchmark, and you already own it.
Build the grid
Take your last hundred completed orders. For each one, record: decoration method, quantity band, revenue, blank cost, decoration cost, direct labour, and any reprint cost. Then group.
| Method | Quantity band | Orders | Avg realised margin | Target |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Screen print | 1 to 23 | |||
| Screen print | 24 to 99 | |||
| Screen print | 100+ | |||
| DTG | 1 to 11 | |||
| DTG | 12+ | |||
| Embroidery | 1 to 23 | |||
| Embroidery | 24+ | |||
| DTF | Any |
Realised margin, not quoted margin. The difference between the two is where the money goes: artwork time you absorbed, a reprint you swallowed, a rush you did not charge for, freight you underestimated.
Read it in this order
1. Which cells are below target? Usually the small-quantity screen print band, because setup was under-charged. See setting a minimum.
2. Where is quoted margin furthest from realised? That gap is a process problem, not a pricing one. Chase the cause before you change any prices.
3. Which customers appear repeatedly in the weak cells? Often one large account has been quietly negotiated below viability over several years, one small concession at a time.
4. Which method is strongest? That is where your sales effort should point, and it is often not the one you have been promoting.
Then check the market, narrowly
Once you know your own numbers, a little outside comparison is useful, but keep it narrow: shops in your own region, on the same garment tier, in the same customer segment. Public price lists, online store pricing, and campaign store pages are all visible. That tells you whether the price your maths requires is one your market will pay.
If your required price is far above local market rates, the problem is cost, not price: garment sourcing, setup time, or utilisation.
Raise prices without an announcement
New quotes at the new price. Existing accounts at their next natural reorder, with notice and a reason if they ask. Percentage rises across the board announced in a letter invite negotiation from every customer at once, including the profitable ones who were not going to complain.
Re-run it quarterly
Blank costs move, wages move, your utilisation moves. A benchmark is a habit rather than an exercise. Put it next to your weekly KPI review as a quarterly job.
Add the two columns that change the answer
The grid above works on revenue and material cost. Two more columns turn it from interesting into actionable.
Labour hours per job. Not estimated, measured. This is the column that separates the jobs you want more of from the jobs you have been proud of.
Margin per shop hour. Realised margin divided by the hours the job consumed. It is the single most useful number a decorating business can compute, because your press hours, not your customers, are what you are actually selling.
| Method | Quantity band | Realised margin | Hours | Margin per hour |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Screen print | 100+ | £402 | 4.5 | £89 |
| Screen print | 1 to 23 | £61 | 1.8 | £34 |
| Embroidery | 24+ | £288 | 3.1 | £93 |
| DTG | 1 to 11 | £38 | 0.4 | £95 |
| DTF | Any | £96 | 1.6 | £60 |
Those figures are illustrative, but the shape is common: the small screen print band looks acceptable on percentage and is the worst use of an hour in the building, while single-piece DTG, widely assumed to be a nuisance, is often the best.
Where the labour number comes from
Every figure in that last column depends on knowing the hours, which means someone has to record them. The workable version on a shop floor is a clock-on station: an order number, a button, and no forms. Staff clock on when they start a run and off when they finish, the hours land on the job at each person's own labour rate, and nobody is filling in a timesheet from memory on a Friday.
Once that exists, the job costing report produces this benchmark grid as a report rather than an evening's work: costed revenue, cost of goods, gross margin, labour cost and margin after labour, split by day, by decoration method and by customer, plus a ranked list of the jobs that consumed the most hours in the period.
The reason to snapshot costs onto the line at quote time, rather than recomputing them later, is that a benchmark has to be stable. If a supplier price rise in March silently rewrites what February's jobs appeared to cost, the trend you are reading is fiction.
Read the customer view before the method view
Method-level benchmarks tell you what to price. Customer-level benchmarks tell you what to say yes to. Rank customers by realised margin per hour rather than by revenue and the list usually reorders itself substantially, because the biggest accounts tend to be the ones that negotiated hardest, sent the most artwork revisions and asked for the most rushes.
Three specific things to look for:
- A large account below your average margin per hour. Do not fire it, reprice it at the next natural reorder, and start with the extras: artwork, rushes, names.
- A small account well above average. That is your ideal customer profile, and it should be shaping who your sales effort targets. See getting your first ten wholesale accounts.
- A customer whose quoted and realised margins diverge most. That is a process leak specific to how you handle that account, not a pricing question.
What to do with sales incentives
If you pay commission, pay it on something the rep controls and the shop can afford. Commission on ex-tax order value at dispatch is the honest version: tax is not your money, and a quote that never ships never earned anything. Freezing the rate onto the order when the rep is assigned means a rate change next quarter does not rewrite what was already earned, which keeps the payroll conversation short. Printer's Friend handles commission that way, with per-rep totals for the period sitting in the same report as the margin figures they were earned on.
Printer's Friend reports realised margin per order, per line and per customer from the jobs you have already run, so this grid is a report rather than an evening of spreadsheet work. The pricing formulas behind each method are in screen print, DTG, embroidery and DTF.