Today, we cover:
Contract decorating is the industry's term for producing an order someone else sold. InkSoft's guide to the model draws the line cleanly: the seller sells, the producer produces, and the producer is paid for the decoration alone — not the garment, not the markup, not the artwork. That single omission changes the arithmetic of an entire business. A shop selling direct marks up the blank and the print and can bill separately for art; the same shop running contract work earns pennies per impression and makes its money on volume. The ebook's own worked example is a distributor moving over 100,000 pieces a year, for whom saving a quarter per unit is twenty-five thousand dollars.
The rest of that document is mostly norms, which is what makes it worth reading six years on. A defect allowance of 2% per decoration location is standard, and it comes off the final invoice. Samples are a separate order, not a favor. Post-production — relabeling, polybagging, kitting, drop-shipping to thousands of individual addresses — now belongs to the decorator too, and newer shops consistently underestimate how many days it consumes. None of this is written into law. It is the accumulated etiquette of a trade that runs on other people's inventory and other people's deadlines.
Distributors formalize that etiquette into programs. The S&S Contract Decorator Network application lists its benefits before its questions: no fees for members who meet the volume floor, free ground shipping for contract customers, a daily manifest of inbound orders, and a spoilage and marketing fund that accrues against product shipped in for decoration. The requirements are where the document turns specific. An applicant must operate primarily as a contract decorator, already service 12 to 15 shared S&S customers, and commit to a floor of $400,000 in annual shipped-in volume. It must also have an established website and marketing plan describing its contract services, because a referral is only worth making if it lands somewhere. The form then asks which competitor programs the shop participates in — SanMar's PSST, alphabroder's MPACT — and whether it pays a fee for any of them. It is a referral program and a competitive survey arriving in the same envelope.
The shops receiving that work advertise their constraints as features. We Print Shirts claims no minimum order quantity and then notes, in the next breath, that contract clients tend to land at 48 pieces per design — the honest version of a minimum, which is simply the quantity below which the math stops working for both parties. Seven to ten business days after art approval, goods received, and payment cleared. All-inclusive pricing with no separate screen charges or color-matching fees. Blind shipping, nondisclosure agreements, private neck labels. The pitch is not that they print well. The pitch is that they will not take your customer.
The final threshold is credit, and it is the one most new shops meet first. Premco's customer application states the sequence without decoration: the first order is prepaid, the second is prepaid or applied against a requested credit line, and the evaluation runs through ASI and Experian. The remainder of the packet is sales tax — resale certificates for the five states where the company carries a collection obligation, or a signed declaration accepting the tax instead. A young shop reads this as paperwork. It is the first moment the supply chain puts a number on how far it trusts you, and that number sets the largest order you can accept without financing it out of your own pocket.
What links these four documents is that none of them are marketing. They are the load-bearing terms of an industry that grows by referral and runs on float, published in the least persuasive language available: application forms, allowance percentages, prepayment sequences, volume floors. A shop that wants to grow generally goes looking for more customers. The thresholds suggest the binding constraint is somewhere else entirely.
Capacity is what you can produce; terms are what you are allowed to promise.