Apparel Printing Helps Deer Valley Reach Record Revenue

By Toni McQuilken

Martin James (left) and Erik Hackenschmidt show off one of the many T-shirts printed by Deer Valley Unified School District’s in-plant. | Credit: Deer Valley USD

One service that has been gaining traction in recent years is apparel printing, and Deer Valley Unified School District Print Services in Phoenix, Arizona, is one that has capitalized on this opportunity.

“When we added apparel such as silk screen, DTG (direct to garment), and embroidery, that really took off,” says Martin James, manager of Printing Services. “We passed our total revenue for last year in the first seven months of this fiscal year. Apparel is a six-figure business for us.”

The nine-employee in-plant has accounts with two of the largest blank garment wholesalers in the country to ensure it gets a great price. The shop uses an Epson DTG machine, though James notes, “We do outsource screen print and embroidery. If the order is 25 [pieces] or larger, we send it out to our wholesale trade-only partners.”

Apparel printing has added a massive revenue stream to the in-plant – work that was previously all going outside the organization.

Erik Hackenschmidt prints a shirt.

“We will have another record year in revenue,” James says. “Apparel has helped us reach this goal. I have just been informed of three K-12 in-plants closing down in July in the Phoenix area; you must be an asset and not a liability to your school district.”

James is looking to grow apparel even further, with a multi-pronged approach to marketing it to the district. He uses “internal meetings, email marketing, and we have booths at several associations that are for K-12 school districts. We have over 95 external school districts and nonprofit school-based associations as our customers. We have a booth at the superintendents association in June, and our biggest marketing event in July at the Arizona Association of School Business Officials.”

For those considering adding apparel to their own service mix, James warns them not to rush.

“Start off small and grow your business. It has taken us several years to get to the revenue in apparel that we are currently at,” he says. “Especially with DTG, you want to find the orders with variable data such as personalization. That is where DTG really comes in play compared with conventional screen printing.”