If you like doing samples and get paid well for all of them that you do you are a better business person than most of us. Generally most printing folks I talk to are lucky to get most of their expenses covered for the pre-production samples they do. It is more of a necessary evil and what I sometimes call an “inexpensive insurance policy.”

By insurance policy I mean that if you are printing 20K shirts and the customer not only okayed the mock up, but also sent you back a printed shirt sample with their signature on it, you are a whole lot better off if something was wrong on the shirt.

I know many printers that try and get by with a photo of the shirt before production begins and that is ok for many jobs. What I don’t understand is why most printers either send a photo or send a shirt. If you are sending a physical sample, why would you not also possibly save time and send a photo to the customer. It won’t show everything and the colors might not come out exactly in the photo, etc.  However,  spelling errors, wrong color or style of shirt, placement, and a whole lot of other errors can be caught before that shirt is overnighted and sometimes that makes all the difference in making your deadline by finding the error a day early.

For example you don’t need a real shirt to see what’s wrong with this Bieber shirt, a photo serves the same purose. I mean…

If you want advice on how to take simple but effective photos of your shirts, we did a post on that.