Gang sheets: the cheapest thing most decorators are not doing

A gang sheet is one large piece of transfer film with many designs nested onto it. That is the whole idea. What makes it worth understanding is the pricing model behind it: DTF is priced by the area of film you consume, so the empty space around a design costs you exactly as much as the design does.

• 1

  Sheet instead of twenty transfers

• 22in

  Standard sheet width

• Any

  Length, billed by the inch

Why it saves so much

Order twenty small logos as twenty separate transfers and each one carries its own margin of unused film. Nest the same twenty onto a single sheet and that waste collapses into the gaps between them. On small marks the difference is routinely half the cost, and it takes no extra work from you beyond sending the designs together.

How to send one

• Send every design in one job rather than one at a time, and say they can be ganged.
• Give each design its finished press width in inches. Nesting is done to real dimensions, not to whatever the file happens to be.
• Include quantities per design. Ten of one and two of another nests very differently from six of each.
• Transparent backgrounds throughout. A white box around a logo becomes white ink on the garment and also wastes the film around it.
• Leave the nesting to us — a design rotated ninety degrees often drops the sheet length by several inches.

If you are sending more than three designs in a week, you are almost certainly better off sending them together.

Where it stops helping

Gang sheets are worth less on large designs, because a full back already consumes most of the sheet width and there is little space left to fill. They also assume you are pressing the transfers yourself or have us do it as a separate operation. If everything in the order is a full front on one garment type, order per transfer and keep it simple.