SMPLFD Printing Spoilage Policy

Spoilage is an unfortunate, yet common occurrence in the custom screen printing, embroidery, and garment decoration world.

What is Spoilage exactly?

A supplier/manufacturer issue or production mistake that causes a garment to fall below the acceptable quality level.

There are a few types of spoilage:

  • Manufacturer spoilage - when the garments arrive to our shop with damages (holes, stains, rips, runs, tears, etc.)
  • Production spoilage - when the garments are damaged during the printing process

What does this mean for your job with us?

Here at SMPLFD Printing, our business model is focused around the highest quality printing & garments; but mistakes do happen - on both the manufacturer and production side.

Industry standard is a 3% spoilage rate - meaning that 3 out of 100 of all garments ordered will incur some form of damage during the production process. 

This is simply an acceptable margin of error that exists in our industry and supply chain.

SMPLFD Printing Spoilage Rate

We tend to aim a bit higher, allowing only a 2% spoilage rate (or 1 garment; whichever is greater) w/out replacement or compensation.

NOTE: this spoilage rate only applies to jobs where we source the garments.

What to expect

Our internal data shows that one out of six print jobs with us incur some form of spoilage; and that spoilage rate per job on average hits around 1.75% (a bit less than 2 shirts per 100 prints).

So, mistakes are rare...but they do happen.

If your job requires an extremely specific quantity/size breakdown, we recommend padding your order to ensure that you end up with the correct amount - with a few extras at the very least.

But I paid for 100 tees, and you delivered 98 - now what?

This spoilage rate of 2% (2 out of 100 tees) falls within our allowable spoilage rate, so you'd end up with 98 tees.

What happens if there's spoilage rate exceeds the 2% allowable rate?

Most of the time, you wouldn't know this happened as we tend to replace any garments that fall outside of the 2% range. However, there are some jobs that are too labor intensive to reorder garments for and then go through the whole set up again.

In these cases, we'll go one of two ways:

  • If the invoice was partially paid, we'll refund the original invoice purchase price per garment up to the 2% limit.
  • If the invoice is paid in full, we'll credit the account towards a future order.
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SMPLFD Islandview Detroit

2905 Beaufait Street

Detroit, MI

Weekdays, 8:30-5:30PM

  • 313.285.9564

  • printing@smplfd.com

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