I have been printing novelty mugs for around two years now so I have decided to give some advice on starting a mug printing business. There are hundreds of designs that you could make up and print on to mugs a few ideas are Valentine's day mugs, personalised birthday mugs, funny fishing mugs, funny work-related mugs and more. I will give you some advice below on the best mug presses sublimation paper, ink and mugs to use for printing mugs.

MUG PRESSES

I recommend getting a quality mug press as I went for a cheaper brand it was not very good for pressing some mug design's that I wanted to print. In the end, I ended up purchasing one of the pneumatic mug press from eBay and I must say they are brilliant mug presses for the price below is a picture of the pneumatic press you can get them on eBay for around £75.

numatic mug press

Other mug presses are like the one below as you can see the mug lies on its side in the press instead of standing up I prefer the above press.  

mug press

Printers for sublimation printing

I recommend without a doubt to purchase a Ricoh Aficio SG 3110DN printer as you can set them to periodically clean the heads this is an immense help as sublimation ink tends to clog up if not used regularly. You can purchase a Ricoh sublimation printer bundle from eBay for around £150 that includes refillable cartridges some ink and the printer.

sublimation printer

Mugs and sublimation paper.

Finding decent quality sublimation mugs online can be difficult but we find that xpres.co.uk are the best quality we have found so far, they are a little bit more expensive than other mugs on the market but they are extremely excellent quality and the print finish is far better than the cheaper mugs. For our paper, we use Dino sublimation paper we find that we get better results with this brand than any other used and we have tried nearly all the best paper we could find.

Summery

So, to sum it all up for around £600 you can start a mug printing business and as you don't need much space to run it you can even run it from home with ease. If you have the time to sit down and make the designs up then you could bring a few extra pounds each month with little effort.