Transfers look like the easy money in decoration: no screens, no pretreat, full colour, any fabric. The catch is that your cost is a physical area of film, and the difference between a well-nested sheet and a lazy one is most of your margin.
Cost per square centimetre
cost per cm2 = (film + ink + powder + cure + amortised maintenance) / (sheet area x utilisation)
The utilisation divisor is the part shops skip. A 60 x 100 cm sheet is 6,000 cm2 of film, but you cannot print to the edge and you need gaps for cutting. If you realistically use 78 percent, your effective area is 4,680 cm2, and your true cost per cm2 is 28 percent higher than the naive figure.
Worked example
| Line | Value |
|---|---|
| Sheet, 60 x 100 cm | £2.40 |
| Ink at typical coverage | £3.10 |
| Adhesive powder | £0.55 |
| Cure, power, amortised maintenance | £0.95 |
| Total per sheet | £7.00 |
| Nominal area | 6,000 cm2 |
| Utilisation | 78% |
| Effective area | 4,680 cm2 |
| Cost per cm2 | £0.0015 |
An A4-ish left chest print at 10 x 12 cm is 120 cm2, so £0.18 of film and ink. A full back at 30 x 40 cm is 1,200 cm2, so £1.80. Ten times the material for the same single press cycle, which is precisely why per-design pricing fails.
Then add the labour
Film cost is rarely the biggest line. Per garment you also have: positioning, pressing, peeling, and often a second press. That labour is per garment and does not care about design size, so your price needs both components:
unit price = ((area x cost per cm2) + press labour + blank) x markup
Shops that quote transfers "at £3 a print" are averaging two costs that move independently, and the average is only right for one job.
Nesting is a pricing decision
If you gang several customers' work onto one sheet, you have to decide who benefits from good nesting. Two defensible policies:
- Charge by area used, keep the utilisation gain. Simple, predictable, and your operator has a direct incentive to nest well.
- Charge by area used at a lower rate on standing gang sheets. Rewards customers who send work that nests well and fits your run schedule.
What does not work is charging by area and then quietly absorbing 40 percent waste on badly nested one-offs.
Small jobs need a floor
A 6 x 4 cm name label costs almost nothing in film and the same handling as everything else. Without a minimum order value, you will run sheets for pennies. See setting a minimum order quantity for how to set that floor without turning away good customers.
Printer's Friend costs DTF work by sheet area, with the gang sheet builder reporting waste per sheet so the number in your price matrix is the number you are actually achieving. If the vocabulary is new, gang sheet and nesting are in the glossary.