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Hello. I didn't see a post about printing stickers so I hope I picked the right place to post this. I was wondering if anyone on here has experience with it, what type of ink and substrate needed. I've had customers ask for items for there vehicles, bikes, windows, or whatever and was hoping to be able to provide them for them. I heard its done on vinyl with air dry solvent base ink but wanted to see if anyone on here has tried it before I jump into something I know nothing about. Thanks guys.
There are many ways to produce stickers. There are many different sticker types including paper and vinyl. Colored backings and clear backings are also available. The type of ink needed will depend on the material the sticker is made of.
But I will be honest in that the digital market is picking up speed on the graphic screen printing market. Today you can go online and get vinyl outdoor stickers printed with full color images and photographs for a very good price.
I offer magnetic business cards, stickers, banners and other like items but I can get them all much cheaper done digitally than I could sell them for screen printed. So I can take a digitally produced sticker and do better artwork for less money and produce a color intense product at a very competitive price and all I have to do is art and place the order.
If I wanted to screen print them even as a 1 color it would be a tremendous amount of labor time that I couldn’t charge for. Follow?
Therefore you have to balance this with what you can charge. If you think you have a market for stickers then you have to see what people are willing to pay for say 250 t0 500 pieces. Then you can decide what might be the best method of production based on what your retail pricing may be. If people only want a few stickers for their vehicle then you have to see what price you can command for that type of small run product.
There are still big print houses that will screen print larger runs of 1000 stickers on a roll for instance. But for an order of 250 or less it would be done digitally especially if it is full color work. So again it comes down to volume. Smaller sticker orders will tend to be done digitally today. Screen printing stickers will not be practical on small orders.
You can offer vinyl stickers that are done on a plotter with software. Then the colors have to be layered together for each sticker. So between weeding and layering you still have a lot of labor involved on sticker orders of 100 or more pieces.
Jonathan Monaco
Catspit Productions, LLC
Learn how to screen print tee shirts!
I have printed thousands of decals. Naz-Dar or Sericol work really well as solvents and UV.Not much differnt other than you use a 3 point registration system. The x are your register points' 230 mesh for solvent 355+ for UV
I was wondering if anyone on here has experience with it, what type of ink and substrate needed. I've had customers ask for items for there vehicles, bikes, windows, or whatever and was hoping to be able to provide them for them. I heard its done on vinyl with air dry solvent base ink but wanted to see if anyone on here has tried it before I jump into something I know nothing about. 
Thanks guys.