Banner Pricing

[Tim Painter]

It can’t unless you want to go broke.

My guess lighter weight banner.
Not proper banner vinyl.
Poor quality product.

or Printed banner done in house by someone who has no idea of there actual running costs for there printer.

Personally I wouldn’t loose sleep over it.

Call the customer up and ask do they know precisely what they are getting for there money you may even get the job back at the price you quoted.

Tim.

[Kevin.Beck]

i can`t seem to get good prices for banners, folk seem to class them as cheap signage.

a 10ft x 2 ft white banner, from £75 + VAT, depending upon artwork, complexity etc.

while i was at a wrapping course, started to talk about banners with other folk. there was a digital printed banner there approx 4 x 3ft, 1 person said they would charge £35 for that………………………………

[Stephen Ingham]

at those prices its not even worth switching the lights on in a morning

those types of prices are usually done by “fly by night merchants” here today, gone tomorrow.

we would quote approx. £40-£50 per metre with hems and eyelets

cheers
stephen

[Adrian Hewson]

I am not taking sides but merely quoting costs

We have a Roland SC540EX II cost for ink is approx £2.00 per linear metre 54″ by 1metre

Banner vinyl costs us £1.50 per metre (550gm)

We have our own eyeletting machine cost of 10 eyelets is about £0.50

Print time approx 15 mins
Eyeletting time 15 mins

That gives material cost of banner at £7.50 labour at £20 and hour is £10 if you add 20% to your costs for depreciation of machinery

That gives you a cost of just over £20

I dont know how much artwork time was involved.

But if this was a regular customer, a customer that I wanted to penetrate or one of our trade customers. I could sell the above banner for £44. As a one off £44 is a bit cheap

Regards Adrian

[David McDonald]

Cheers Adrian, I guess it must be a printed banner they were offered.

Macky D

[Peter Normington]

Adrian adding 20% of cost for depreciation is not very acurate, you must work the machine cost out as a separate item per metre printed, then you will get true costs and not just a guess. Your calculations dont add up, they equate to £5 per hour for the printer, Dont know the capital investment for your model but if we assume £10k then it will take 2000 hrs to cover its outlay, not including any maintenance etc or a full years work, non stop, before it starts to make a profit.
Peter

just edited to say that print time may be 15 minutes but what about changing media etc, this must add more time? especially for a one of?

[Adrian Hewson]

Hi Peter

Printer works 20 hours a week
1000 hours a year @ £5 an hour is £5000 printer cost near £20K four years and printer paid for , but most of our jobs are much more expensive so instead of four years to pay off printer which is not a year old it has already paid for itself, now depreciation free

Maintenance costs are built into ink supply all parts and labour

Print time is not the issue as you do not need to watch the machine (not like our Gerber edge II), 15 mins quoted is media load, pc setup, media unload.

Give me 500 banners like this and I will set up pc maybe not in 15 mins but for 500 banners in 2 hours, turn printer on at night come in in the morning and 500 banners are printed

Banners are seriously easy money, so are pop ups so are digital prints

Regards Adrian

[Peter Normington]

Adrian, how do you do 500 banners per night? thats some going over 12 hours thats 41 per hr!
Peter
edit its also over 1000 metres of material so it must be a big roll?

[Adrian Hewson]

Sorry Peter

I dont want to be pedantic, lets not fall out

Of course I cant print 500 banners overnight, but the numbers crunch, we sell these banners locally to trade it is easy money, they dont run overnight, they run when the machine is not being used for normal jobs. But local guys are charging £120 for 10ft by 2ft so we offer 2pcs 10ft by 2ft for discounted price of £100 (our materialis over four foot wide) so two can be printed at once. so for three metres we are getting £100 so e are getting £33.33 per metre

Marketing makes sense

Regards Adrain

[Shane Drew]

Adrian, you are right in your comments here. The only thing I do is price the banners closer to the vinyl market, so I can not be accused of ‘wrecking the market’.

It is not something I do alot of, but some of my opposition charge more than me even with my prices being close to the vinyl prices.

I did a job the other day for some pop up exhibitions signs, and charged $1200 giving me a fairly good profit margin. The client was dubious I could do it so ‘cheap’ because he has been paying $3000 up intil he met me.

Another bloke quoted $600 for digital prints on a 600×900 A Frame, when the going rate is about $250 in my neck of the woods. I am not sure what machines they use, but clearly they are either paying a contractor to print them and adding their margin on top, or they don’t have a clue what it cost to do a print.

thing is tho, people are prepared to pay the price, so he must be a good sales person. 😮

[Peter Normington]

Thanks for the clarification, Adrian,
Thats a fair explanation,
Peter

[Jill Marie Welsh]

I just finished making 21 3’x6′ banners for the baseball team.
They featured the team logo and the client’s logo in one color.
I charged $75, and they upsold them for $200,
which I thought was high.
My material costs for these was about $500,
and it was 4 solid day’s work for me to produce them.
I shoulda charged $100 each, but they ordered so many etc.
I used bandanna banner & Oracal 651.
http://www.cambridgecanvas.com/bandanna/index.html
Alternatively, I am doing the vinyl ONLY for another baseball team,
4’x8′ banners which they supply, in their clients logos up to 3 colors for $75.
I am also doing completely custom 3X10 banners with a logo and tons of text for the hockey team & charging $175 each.
I guess it all depends on the job, but £44 equals about $80 for a 4’x6′, which is way too cheap.
I think I’d charge at least $125 for a one-off custom 3 color banner of that size.
Love….Jill

[David Rowland]

things to watch out for is cheap vinyl on banners and the machines that use cheap ink (unless it is 3rd party ink on a solvent machine), banners can deteriate quickly unless you really want temporary banners.

We are banner printers, but typical banner prices are in the £120-200 region, certainly not cheap but costed to reflect the cost of machine, preping, printing, cutting, stitching & eyelettings.

Biggest problem is when it fails to print for some reason, you can make big losses when the roll runs out suddenly!

[Ian Higgins]

Hi,
I do budget printed banners with eylets but no hems on a pretty regular basis..but i needed a large one last week for a customer, too large for me at 14ft x 8ft so had it printed out, full colour photo image with text…. could not believe they only charged me £120 for it.. un finnished but I thought pretty cheap..
Sometimes wonder how they make money.. mind you not complaining I had quoted £350 for it..

[Robert Lambie]

i think banners are good money… but like has been said, they can and do go wrong at times.
it takes much longer to hem and eyelet a banner than to print the thing… not forgetting design time. which is again longer than the hemming, longer than printing… if you get jobs like adrian is saying, side by side and in multiples, you have won a watch & can afford to undercut if need be. on the other hand if its one or two off only we charge around the same as i would for a square metre of printed vinyl, then some for finishing/design etc

[Bill Dewison]

Humble opinion here, but let the guy charge his £44 and wait a couple of months for him to go out of business. 😮 Unless he’s using banner on a roll and cheap vinyl, its hardly worth his while even doing it, let alone making a profit.

Locally I have quite a few competitors who charge lower than I do, for instance, I charge just under a hundred for a banner, my competitors are charging around the £60-£70 mark 🙄 I still get the work, but very few time-wasters or customers who want something for nothing. Had a chap in at the beginning of the week who wanted 2 banners lettering up for his solarium and he admitted he’d been quoted a cheaper price, virtually half what I was charging, but he was happy with the design and the turnaround so he just ordered there and then. I really do want customers to be happy with what I supply them, but I need to survive and earn a profit, so I just view it that I charge accordingly for the work I do.

You’re obviously going to win some and lose some, but blimey, I wouldn’t even think about competing at those sorts of prices, I’d be out of business in a fortnight. If its banner on a roll though, they do go for very silly money and locally its difficult to charge. I try and stick with 650 banner material and go for quality over price. Its all John Singhs fault!!! I’m blaming him for my approach to pricing/customers, I even crack some of his jokes 🙄

Cheers, Dewi

[Robert Lambie]

quote Macky D:

Cheers Adrian, I guess it must be a printed banner they were offered.

Macky D

😮 ahhh i need to learn to scroll up… i was talking printed but to the trade 😕
take as much as you can get mate… 😉 as dewi has said, dont do anything for nothing.
for anything vinyl we price per letter x hieght etc multiplied by amount of letters… vinyl banners will last longer than printed banners because they resist abrasion much more. but ive seen some cracking printed banners that just couldnt be acheived in vinyl, with that in mind, prices should go right up…

[Adrian Hewson]

Just to clarify things.

I was just explaining to Macky D that £44 was easily attainable. This is not the sort of price would would normally charge for this kind of banner especially if we had designed it, it would be nearer £80. Also we do not hem our banners. But we have produced a lot of them (we buy our banner vinyl in bulk 20 X 25M rolls at a time) most banners are very short term, they use much less ink than a normal print and therefore print fast.

We do supply a lot of these banners to local tradea nd if they supply te artwork we are in at about £20-25 per linear metre (1.3M wide by 1M) extra work that keeps a printer printing helps with the overheads (better a machine that is working than one that is not)

Regards Adrian

[Peter Shaw]

Working out the depreciation cost on a digital printer per metre of printed material is an absolute nightmare and can distort prices dramatically.

I took a different view: We put loads of routine work thru the printer thus avoiding weeding, appn tape etc. Thus the printer is replacing what used to be man-time. I’ve costed the printer’s purchase price at 1 man for 1 year. Now it’s much easier to work out prices because that’s what you did prior to the printer.

It also means the printer pays for itself in 1 year! This really does work. I’ve one less member of staff and we’re getting more work through.

Peter

P.S. Next year I’m buying 5 printers and firing all the staff!!!!