Commercial Screen Printing (U.S.) — Industry Primer
NAICS 2022 code 323113. NAICS is the North American Industry Classification System, the standard the U.S. government uses to sort businesses.
1. Overview
Screen printing is the process behind most of the printed T-shirts, hoodies, caps, tote bags, yard signs, decals and industrial labels you see every day. Ink is pushed through a fine mesh stencil — one screen per color — onto a garment or other surface, then heat-cured. Production normally comprises artwork and color separation, screen preparation and imaging, ink mixing, press setup and registration, printing, curing or drying, finishing, inspection, packing and screen reclamation.[1] Commercial screen printing (NAICS 323113) is the job-shop side of that: independent "decorators" who print other people's designs on a per-order basis, mostly on apparel bought blank from a wholesaler.[2][3]
Why an investor should care: this is a roughly $12.5 billion U.S. industry[4] sitting at the center of two much larger, faster-growing money flows — the decorated-apparel market (about $5.1 billion in 2023, growing at a low-double-digit annual rate)[5][6] and the $26.8 billion promotional-products channel that funnels corporate marketing dollars into branded merchandise.[7][8] It is also a textbook example of a fragmented, low-barrier, local-service manufacturing trade — thousands of small shops, no dominant player, and a technology shift (digital printing) reshaping the low end.
Public vs. private ways in. There is essentially no public pure-play screen-printing shop — the operators are almost all privately held small businesses. Public-market investors get exposure only around the industry: the blank-garment suppliers upstream (Gildan), the equipment makers (Kornit), the ink suppliers (Avient's Wilflex and Rutland brands), the mass-customization platforms and promo distributors that resell decoration (Cimpress, 4imprint), and consumer-DIY adjacents (Cricut). Private investors, by contrast, can own the thing itself — a local shop is a classic small-business, search-fund, or private-equity roll-up target.
2. What it is, and how it's structured
Scope (what's in). Establishments primarily engaged in screen printing on a job-order basis, without publishing. That covers printing on apparel and textiles (T-shirts, caps, jackets, towels, napkins) and screen printing on purchased stock such as stationery, invitations, labels, signage, glass, plastics and metals.[2][3] In practice, most revenue and shop count is textile/apparel decoration; the rest is graphics (signs, decals, point-of-purchase displays) and industrial/specialty printing (membrane switches, glass, ceramics, electronics surfaces).
What it excludes — and the adjacent NAICS codes. The classification deliberately carves out neighbors that look similar:
- 323111 — Commercial Printing (except Screen and Books): offset/digital commercial print, business forms.[3]
- 323117 — Books Printing.[3]
- 313310 — Textile & Fabric Finishing Mills: printing on grey goods (raw fabric before it becomes a garment), versus printing on finished garments here.[3]
- Also outside 323113: embroidery (a different decoration method, usually its own shops), digital direct-to-garment / direct-to-film print-on-demand operations that self-classify elsewhere, and the promotional-products distributors who sell decorated goods but subcontract the printing.
Classification caution. The most common analytical error is to equate "decorated apparel," "custom T-shirts," "promotional products" or even all facilities containing a screen press with NAICS 323113. Digital-only apparel printers, embroiderers, promotional-products distributors, captive in-house print departments and vertically integrated manufacturers may all sit outside the code. Conversely, 323113 includes non-apparel work. The Census establishment count is not a firm count, and an online seller may outsource production to several separately counted contract shops.
Ownership mix. Overwhelmingly private and small: independent owner-operators, family businesses, and a layer of franchised storefronts (e.g., Fully Promoted). A minority of shops are owned by private-equity-backed platforms rolling up decorated-apparel and print-on-demand capacity. No public company operates screen-printing job shops as its core business.
3. How big it is
Federal statistics (our ground-truth figures):
| Metric | Value | Source (year) |
|---|---|---|
| Receipts (revenue) | $12.48 billion | 2022 Economic Census[4] |
| Firms | 5,708 | 2022 Economic Census[4] |
| Establishments | 5,854 | Census County Business Patterns 2023[9] |
| Paid employees | 70,664 | Census County Business Patterns 2023[9] |
| Annual payroll | $3.11 billion | Census County Business Patterns 2023[9] |
| Average pay (implied) | ~$44,000 | derived from the two rows above[9] |
| SBA small-business size standard | 500 employees | SBA size standards 2023[10] |
At roughly $12.5 billion in receipts spread over ~5,700 firms, the average firm books about $2.2 million a year — and even that overstates the typical shop, because a thin top tier pulls the mean up. The small-shop skew is pronounced: in 2022, establishments with one to nine employees represented 74% of the industry's ~5,800 establishments.[11] SBA is the U.S. Small Business Administration; its 500-employee ceiling means effectively every firm in this industry qualifies as a small business.
The undercount caveat — important here. The federal employer counts miss the long tail. County Business Patterns only counts establishments with payroll (5,854).[9] Private industry trackers that also include non-employer operators — the one-person garage printers, home-studio decorators, and online merch sellers who report no employees — put the business count around 15,000, while pegging total revenue at a similar ~$12.8 billion.[4][12] The reconciliation is telling: the industry has two to three times more operating shops than the employer data shows, but the extra thousands are tiny, so they barely move the revenue total. Read the Census figures as the commercial core, not the full population of everyone who owns a press.
For scale context, screen printing feeds two bigger pools it doesn't fully capture: the U.S. decorated-apparel market (~$5.1 billion in 2023, forecast to grow at roughly 13% a year)[5][6] and the promotional-products channel, which hit a record $26.8 billion in 2024 across all product types — of which apparel represented 26.6% and caps and hats 9.0%, with online sales accounting for 25.5% of the total.[7][8][13] Note that these promotional-market figures contain distributor markups, imported hard goods, embroidery, digital printing and many participants outside 323113; they are not screen-printing market size. CAGR here means compound annual growth rate.
4. The investable universe
There is no publicly traded company whose main business is running screen-printing job shops. The industry is too fragmented and too local. Public-market exposure is therefore adjacent — upstream inputs, equipment, or resale platforms. The private/other owners are where the actual printing lives.
Public companies (adjacent exposure):
| Company | Ticker | ~Scale | Relationship to screen printing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cimpress (Vistaprint, National Pen) | Nasdaq: CMPR | ~$3.4B FY2025 revenue[14] | Mass-customization platform; aggregates large volumes of individually small customized orders, producing them with near mass-production efficiency; sells printed/decorated apparel and promo online, part in-house, part subcontracted[15] |
| Gildan Activewear | NYSE/TSX: GIL | World's #1 blank-apparel maker[16] | The dominant input: undecorated tees/fleece that shops print on; acquired HanesBrands Dec 2025 for ~$2.2B[17] |
| Cricut | Nasdaq: CRCT | ~$713M FY2024 revenue[18] | Consumer cutting/heat-transfer machines and materials — DIY adjacent to shop decoration |
| Kornit Digital | Nasdaq: KRNT | ~$204M FY2024 revenue[19] | "Picks-and-shovels" — industrial digital-textile and DTG systems that compete with and modernize screen shops; explicitly targets the screen-replacement market[20] |
| 4imprint Group | LSE: FOUR | ~$1.37B 2024 revenue (mostly U.S.)[21] | Largest North-American promotional-products distributor; buys decorated goods, subcontracts the printing |
| Avient | NYSE: AVNT | ~$3.2B revenue (diversified) | Supplies Wilflex and Rutland screen-printing inks — highly diluted upstream consumables exposure within a much larger specialty-materials company[22] |
DTG = direct-to-garment (inkjet printing straight onto a shirt). Note the tension inside this list: Gildan and 4imprint benefit when decoration volume rises, while Kornit's digital gear partly displaces traditional screen work.
Major private / other owners (where the printing actually happens):
- Custom Ink — best-known U.S. custom-apparel brand, ~$148 million revenue; online-front, subcontracted-and-owned production.[23] Great Hill Partners and HarbourVest invested in the business in 2019, reflecting private-equity interest in digitally acquired custom-apparel demand.[24]
- Lakeshirts/Blue 84 — scaled private platform serving collegiate and resort channels, vertically integrating garment sourcing, design, decoration and merchandising; backed by Carlson Private Capital.[25]
- Print-on-demand platforms — Printful and Printify (merged into a ~$600 million combined operation), plus Gelato and others, running digital merch at scale.[26]
- PE-backed decorated-apparel platforms — e.g., Platinum Equity's Mad Engine and its print-on-demand roll-ups.[27]
- Fully Promoted — the largest branded-apparel/promo franchise network of storefront decorators.
- Thousands of independent local shops — the bulk of NAICS 323113 by count, serving schools, teams, small businesses and events.
5. How the money works
Screen printing is a fixed-setup, low-marginal-cost business, and every economic decision flows from that shape.
The revenue stack per order. A shop typically charges for: (1) the blank garment, marked up modestly and largely passed through; (2) a per-piece, per-color, per-location decoration charge (a 3-color front print costs more than a 1-color); (3) one-time screen/setup fees (one screen per color must be burned before the run); (4) art/digitizing fees; and (5) rush premiums. The profit is concentrated in the decoration labor and setup, not the shirt.
Why volume is everything. Burning screens and setting up the press is costly and identical whether you print 12 shirts or 1,200. Spread over a big run, per-shirt cost collapses; on a tiny run it's punishing. This is the core unit economic: screen printing wins on bulk, loses on short runs. Digital methods (DTG, and increasingly DTF — direct-to-film heat transfers) invert that — no screens, so they win the small-batch and one-off jobs. The competitive break-even traditionally sits somewhere around a couple dozen to ~72 pieces; below it, digital; above it, screens.[28][29] However, the break-even is shifting: Kornit reports traditional screen printers now adopting digital for runs of 250–500 units, sometimes reaching 1,000, and notes that more than 40% of its 2025 system deals came from new customers, many of them traditional screen printers.[30] Many modern shops run hybrid (screens for volume, DTG/DTF for short runs and full-color designs).
Screen reclamation is a meaningful operating function, not incidental cleaning. Ink, stencil emulsion and residual "ghost" images must be removed so mesh can be reused. Reclaiming consumes labor, water and chemicals and creates wastewater and waste-handling obligations that factor into per-job costs.[31]
The levers owners actually watch:
- Press utilization / throughput. An automatic press is a capital asset that only earns when it's running; shops live and die on machine-hours booked and pieces-per-hour. Idle presses are the enemy. A busy shop can still produce weak margins if its order book consists of numerous low-quantity, multi-color jobs that repeatedly stop the press.
- Blank (input) cost. The single biggest cost of goods is the undecorated garment. Gildan identifies cotton and polyester as primary raw materials and warns that cotton, petroleum, natural gas and electricity prices affect fiber, chemical, transportation and manufacturing costs.[32] When blank prices move, margins move with them unless the shop reprices. Tariffs on imported blanks flow straight through.
- Labor and setup efficiency. Faster screen changes, better art prep, and automation directly raise contribution per job.
- Job mix. High-color, high-volume, repeat corporate/team accounts are the profit center; one-off small orders are low-margin or loss-leaders steered to digital.
- Cyclicality. Demand tracks discretionary marketing, event, and school/sports budgets — it softens in recessions and swings with events (elections, tournaments, festivals) and seasons (back-to-school, holidays).
Recent margin pressure. PRINTING United's decorated-apparel survey of 72 companies illustrates the squeeze: in the first quarter of 2024, respondents reported sales up 2.4%, operating costs up 6.5% and prices up 3.2% year over year. Only 26.1% reported higher pretax profitability; 34.8% reported lower profitability.[33]
Margins are structurally thin. With near-zero barriers to entry (a garage, one press) and no pricing power, the industry runs highly competitive; differentiation comes from speed, quality, service, and niche (collegiate/team spirit wear, corporate programs, licensed goods) rather than scale.
6. What drives demand
- Corporate marketing and promotional spend — branded swag, trade-show giveaways, employee/uniform programs. This is the single largest demand engine and the reason the ~$26.8 billion promo channel matters.[7][8]
- Schools, sports teams, clubs — spirit wear, team jerseys, fundraisers; seasonal and recurring.
- Small businesses, brands, and creators — merch for shops, bands, influencers, and e-commerce stores, increasingly via print-on-demand.
- Events and causes — concerts, festivals, races, political campaigns, nonprofits, reunions.
- Uniforms and workwear — decorated staff apparel and safety wear.
- Tourism/retail — souvenir and novelty tees.
- Industrial/graphics screen printing — signage, decals, point-of-purchase displays, and specialty substrates (glass, plastics, electronics), a smaller but steadier, less fashion-driven slice.
Gildan describes the screen-print channel's end markets as educational institutions, athletic dealers, event merchandisers, promotional-product distributors, charities, entertainment promoters, travel and tourism venues, retailers, uniforms and team wear.[34] The through-line: most demand is discretionary marketing and event spending, which makes the industry moderately cyclical and sensitive to the health of small business and corporate budgets. Capacity can become temporarily constrained around school, sports, election and holiday calendars.
7. Regulation
Screen printing is lightly licensed but meaningfully environmentally regulated, because it handles inks, solvents and chemical strippers.
- Hazardous waste (EPA / RCRA). The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) governs disposal of spent solvents, waste ink, and screen-reclamation chemicals; the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) publishes printing-specific generator guidance. Most shops are small-quantity generators but must still manifest and dispose of hazardous waste properly.[35][36]
- Air quality (VOCs). Solvent-based inks and cleanup chemicals emit volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Local air districts regulate them — California's South Coast district Rule 1171, for example, caps VOC content in screen-printing cleanup solvents and pushed the shift to low-VOC and water-based products.[37]
- Wastewater. Screen reclamation rinse water is regulated for discharge into municipal sewer systems. Critically, "water-based," "biodegradable" or "drain safe" chemistry does not automatically make ink-contaminated reclaiming water permissible for discharge.[38][39]
- Worker safety (OSHA). The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) requires hazard communication, proper flammable-materials storage, and personal protective equipment for ink/solvent handling. OSHA also identifies bending, reaching, forceful squeegee use, lifting screens, repetitive motion and prolonged awkward posture as material ergonomic hazards in screen-printing operations.[1][39]
- Product-safety and IP. Children's apparel triggers CPSIA (Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act) limits on lead/phthalates in prints; California's Prop 65 adds warning rules. Critically, decorators need rights to the artwork they print — trademark, copyright, and licensing (collegiate and pro-sports logos are licensed programs). Printing unlicensed logos is an infringement/counterfeiting liability.
None of this is heavy enough to bar entry, but compliance is a real recurring cost that scales with solvent-based volume — one reason the industry keeps migrating toward water-based and digital inks.
8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation
This is one of the least concentrated manufacturing industries in the economy. The federal concentration data make the point:
- The largest 4 firms hold just 16.4% of revenue; the top 8, 21.0%; the top 20, 30.1%; the top 50, 40.5%.[4]
- The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI, a standard concentration measure where 10,000 = monopoly and under ~1,500 = unconcentrated) is 102.8 — near-atomistic competition.[4]
- Independent trackers confirm no single company holds even 5% of the market.[12]
Forces reshaping it:
- Digital disruption from below. DTG and especially DTF transfers keep lowering the minimum viable order size, letting print-on-demand platforms and even hobbyists (Cricut-style) capture short-run work that once went to local screen shops.[18][28][29] In PRINTING United's survey, digital methods rose from 23.8% of decorated-apparel production in 2022 to 33.4% in 2024; respondents expected 47.1% by 2026. Screen printing and other analog methods still comprised the majority, but the direction is clear.[33]
- Consolidation from above. Private equity is rolling up decorated-apparel and print-on-demand capacity into larger platforms (e.g., Platinum Equity's Mad Engine; the Printful–Printify merger), chasing scale in production and e-commerce fulfillment rather than in traditional screen shops.[26][27]
- Upstream consolidation. The blank-supplier side is consolidating hard — Gildan's ~$2.2 billion acquisition of HanesBrands (completed December 2025) concentrates pricing power over the industry's biggest input.[17]
- Franchising (Fully Promoted) offers a branded, standardized on-ramp for storefront decorators.
Net: the printing layer stays fragmented and local, while money and pricing power accumulate in the layers around it — blanks, equipment, software, and e-commerce distribution.
9. Risks
- Technology displacement. DTG/DTF and print-on-demand erode the short-run, full-color work and can commoditize decoration; screen shops that don't add digital capacity risk losing the low end.[28][29]
- Input-cost and tariff exposure. Blank garments are the largest cost; cotton prices, freight, and tariffs on imported apparel/equipment flow through to thin margins quickly.[32]
- Thin margins, no pricing power. Near-zero entry barriers and 5,700-plus competitors keep the industry price-competitive; a single-shop owner has little cushion.
- Cyclicality. Demand rides discretionary marketing, event, and school budgets — the first to be cut in a downturn.
- Customer concentration. Shops leaning on a few large corporate or team accounts are exposed if one leaves.
- Environmental/compliance cost creep. Tightening VOC and hazardous-waste rules raise costs, especially for solvent-based operations.[35][37]
- IP/licensing liability. Printing unlicensed logos or counterfeits carries legal and reputational risk.
- Labor and succession. Skilled press operators are scarce, and many owner-operator shops face no clear succession — a risk to the business, but also the opportunity behind roll-ups and search-fund acquisitions. Color matching, registration, curing and troubleshooting require experience, while loading garments and manual printing are repetitive.[1]
- Equipment obsolescence. Small operators are especially exposed when they finance automated presses or digital systems against peak-season demand that does not persist.
10. How to invest, and the outlook
Public-market routes (all indirect). Because no listed company runs screen shops, public investors pick a layer:
- Inputs — Gildan (GIL), the dominant blank-apparel supplier, now bulked up with HanesBrands; a bet on decoration volume broadly, not on any shop. It is upstream exposure to blank/imprintable apparel volumes and cotton, polyester and energy economics.[16][17][32]
- Equipment / picks-and-shovels — Kornit Digital (KRNT); note it's a double-edged bet, since its digital systems both serve and disrupt screen printers.[19][20]
- Platforms / distribution — Cimpress (CMPR) for mass-customization at scale, 4imprint (FOUR, London-listed) for the promo-distribution channel.[14][21]
- Consumables — Avient (AVNT) for highly diluted ink exposure.[22]
- Consumer DIY adjacency — Cricut (CRCT).[18]
These carry the usual public-market attributes (share prices, dividends, valuation multiples) but only proxy the screen-printing trade — none is a clean play on it.
Private-market routes (direct ownership). This is where you actually own the industry:
- Buy a local shop. With ~5,700 firms, aging owners, and SBA-eligible economics, screen shops are a common small-business acquisition, SBA-loan, and search-fund target.[10]
- Build a roll-up. The fragmentation (HHI ~103, no firm >5%) is exactly the setup private equity likes; add-on acquisitions of decorated-apparel and print-on-demand capacity are already happening.[26][27]
- Franchise — buy into a network like Fully Promoted for a standardized model.
- Back the disruptors — venture/growth exposure to print-on-demand platforms and decoration software/equipment.
Private-market diligence should disaggregate revenue by screen printing, DTG, DTF, embroidery, product resale and fulfillment. Operational diligence should examine press hours and utilization, average run length, colors per order, setup minutes, spoilage and reprint rates, on-time delivery, seasonal overtime, customer concentration, artwork ownership, blank-apparel pass-through, inventory turnover, wastewater practices and maintenance capex.
Near-term outlook (forward-looking). The decorated-apparel and promotional-products pools that feed screen printing are projected to keep growing at low-double-digit rates through the early 2030s, driven by personalization, creator/merch culture, and corporate branding.[5][6][7] The clearest structural shift is the digital migration: DTF and DTG are lowering short-run costs and shifting volume toward on-demand fulfillment, so the winners are likely to be hybrid shops that keep screens for bulk while adding digital for everything else. The likely operating end state is hybrid rather than immediate screen extinction — a diversified decorator routes long, repeatable spot-color jobs to screen presses; personalized or complex short runs to DTG or DTF; polyester work to sublimation; and premium logos to embroidery or patches. This raises capital and workflow complexity but expands the addressable order mix. Watch three swing factors: tariffs and cotton prices (which set blank costs and margins), the pace of DTF adoption (which resets the screen-vs-digital break-even), and consolidation — both upstream (Gildan-Hanes) and in the print-on-demand roll-ups. Traditional screen printing isn't going away — for high-volume, durable, vibrant prints it remains the cheapest method — but its share of small jobs will keep eroding.
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- The Target Report, "On-Demand Print & Merch is BIG Business for Private Equity" (Platinum Equity / Mad Engine), 2024. https://www.thetargetreport.com/2024/12/on-demand-print-merch-is-big-business.html
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- U.S. EPA, "Regulatory Resources for NAICS 323" (environmental compliance overview), 2025. https://www.epa.gov/regulatory-information-sector/printing-and-related-support-activities-sector-naics-323
- South Coast AQMD, "Low-VOC, Low-Toxicity Cleanup Solvents for Screen Printing" (Rule 1171), 2006. https://www.aqmd.gov/docs/default-source/rule-book/support-documents/rule-1171/
- U.S. EPA, "Screen Reclamation Wastewater Assessment" (discharge limitations for water-based chemistry), 1996. https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPURL.cgi?Dockey=94005803.TXT
- StartPermit, "How to Start a Printing Business: Licenses, Environmental Permits, OSHA" (VOC/OSHA/wastewater permitting), 2026. https://startpermit.com/blog/how-to-start-a-printing-business/