Back in September 2022, the Shop Talks stage handed us one of the more honest conversations we’ve run. Dennis Tam of Ampersand in Brooklyn sat down with Rick Roth to talk not about wins, but about regrets, what they’d do differently if they could start over. Dennis came to printing the long way: an NYU business degree and five years at Morgan Stanley before he traded Wall Street for water-based ink in his basement. Rick’s been at it, in his words, since dinosaurs walked the earth. Here’s the rundown of what they wish someone had told them before the first screen ever hit a press. What I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Screen Printing Business.

A Business Plan

Dennis’s first piece of advice sounds like something a banker says, and that’s exactly why printers skip it. But a plan doesn’t have to be formal. It can be a notebook. The point is deciding where the business is going before you buy the press. Are you building it to sell? To pass to your kids? To throw off residual income? Rick frames it more bluntly: do you want to be the best printer, or the richest one? Those aren’t the same goal, and they don’t always lead to the same shop.

Screen printing and running a business are two different jobs

This was the rude awakening that kept resurfacing. Printing and business are separate, independent skills, and you need both. There are excellent printers who are out of business, and people who can barely pull a squeegee running the most profitable shops in the country. Dennis points to CustomInk: functionally a marketing company that happens to print, not a print shop that happens to market. Screen printing is manufacturing, a time-based operation where your income for the day is a function of how much product goes out the door. The pattern both men have watched for years: business people who learn to print tend to outlast printers who try to learn business.

The gear costs more than the brochure says, but you can start tiny

Everyone walks in thinking a few hundred dollars gets them started. Next it’s thousands. Then a $20,000–$40,000 automatic. And auto-reclaim, then a dryer. Dennis grew from one color, one station into a shop with an auto. Rick started in a basement with hand-cut screens, a 150-watt bulb and a pie plate for an exposure unit, glass holding the vellum down, no vacuum frame, and no press at all, printing by eye, cardboard in every shirt, thousands of shirts that way. Neither of them recommends the pie plate. The real lesson: money makes decisions easier, so grow into the equipment instead of buying it all on day one.

Stop copying the shop down the block’s prices

The most common mistake in the industry: “I’ve got 12 shirts, one color, front, what do I charge?” posted to a Facebook group. It’s a recipe for disaster, because everyone’s overhead is different. Rick’s Rhode Island shop, Dennis’s Brooklyn rent, a partner’s costs in South Carolina, none of those produce the same number. The fix is to know your own burn rate: rent, wages, and expenses divided across roughly 261 working days a year, adjusted for the fact that your press is probably only running about 30% of the time.

Then watch the bracket trap. When pricing jumps in tiers, 24, then 36, then 100, the 25th shirt is always cheaper than the 24th, so you lose money at the start of every bracket. Incremental pricing, where each piece costs a little less than the one before, closes that leak. And the money is real: the screen printing services market is projected to grow from $8.16 billion in 2025 to $10.24 billion by 2030, according to Mordor Intelligence. There’s room in this industry, but only if your prices reflect your costs, not your competitor’s.

Be skeptical of the internet

Facebook groups are fun for laughs and bad for answers. Ask what mesh count to use and you’ll get twenty replies, most of them wrong, and the correct one usually draws no comments at all. Instagram and YouTube are the highlight reel, nobody posts the dye migration, the uncured shirt, or the mis-registered run. Both panelists offered the same anti-buzzword test: when someone says they “only” or “always” do something and “it works every time,” they’re wrong. Printing is a system, and systems have conditions.

Price isn’t what loses customers, bad product is

This one surprised even them. Customers don’t walk over price. They walk over a burnt shirt, an uncured print, a misaligned job. The flip side is loyalty: everyone makes mistakes, and how you handle the inevitable one matters more than avoiding it. Apologize, fix it, don’t argue. Dennis learned the pricing lesson the hard way, he worked himself into a hospital stay with shingles, came out, raised every customer’s prices, and nobody said a word. He’s not alone: in a room full of shop owners, nearly everyone had been afraid the last time they raised prices, and almost none had lost customers for it.

Selling beats printing, and contracting is not a dirty word

The throughline of the whole conversation: the people who make money are good salespeople, not necessarily the best printers. You can have anything produced by someone else. A heat press, transfers, and a phone is a business. Contract printing, by contrast, is brutal, it demands you know your numbers cold and have your process dialed in, and you only win by being faster, more accurate, more unique, or better at fulfillment than the shop next door. Dennis fights the contract-versus-control instinct every day, because Brooklyn rent makes in-house expensive. The advice for anyone stuck on doing it all themselves: find good partners, don’t be a control freak, and don’t steal each other’s customers.

The bottom line

The thread running through every regret in this talk is the same: screen printing rewards the people who treat it like a business and stay humble about the craft. Dennis says the printers who think they know everything are usually the ones on Facebook, and the ones who admit they’re only at 85% are usually the ones still in business. Watch the full Shop Talks conversation on YouTube.