# We Read 44,931 Print Shop Websites. Only 5.4% Tell Customers What File They Need.

> A measured look at what screen printers, sign makers, embroiderers and promo shops publish about artwork: who states a format requirement, who mentions vectorizing, and what the silence of the other 94% actually costs.

**Source:** https://vectosolve.com/blog/what-print-shops-ask-customers-for-artwork-data
**Author:** Robin Monteiro (Founder of VectoSolve)
**Published:** 2026-08-06
**Category:** Industry
**Reading time:** 7
**Tags:** print shops, artwork, industry data, screen printing, embroidery, art fee

---

<p>We crawled the public pages of 44,931 decorating businesses across screen printing, signage, promotional products, embroidery, laser and banner work, and recorded what each one tells its customers about artwork. Not what they charge, not what they claim: what is written on their own site.</p>

<p>One number stands out, and it is not the one we expected.</p>

<h2>What shops publish</h2>

<table>
<thead><tr><th>What the site says</th><th>Shops</th><th>Share</th></tr></thead>
<tbody>
<tr><td>Runs machine work (laser, embroidery, CNC, cutter)</td><td>16,716</td><td>37.2%</td></tr>
<tr><td>Offers custom or one-off work</td><td>8,111</td><td>18.1%</td></tr>
<tr><td>Mentions vectorizing or redrawing artwork</td><td>4,831</td><td>10.8%</td></tr>
<tr><td>Asks customers to upload their own files</td><td>2,508</td><td>5.6%</td></tr>
<tr><td><strong>States a vector file requirement (.ai / .eps)</strong></td><td><strong>2,433</strong></td><td><strong>5.4%</strong></td></tr>
<tr><td>Publishes artwork specifications</td><td>966</td><td>2.1%</td></tr>
<tr><td>Publishes an art or setup fee</td><td>623</td><td>1.4%</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table>

<p>By trade, the corpus breaks down as 10,584 screen printers, 7,033 sign makers, 6,748 promotional products companies, 4,880 embroiderers, 4,143 laser shops, 3,536 banner printers, 2,313 apparel decorators and 1,938 patch makers.</p>

<h2>The 94.6% who say nothing</h2>

<p>Just over five percent of these businesses tell a customer, anywhere on their site, that they need artwork as a vector file. Every one of the other 42,498 still needs one. A laser cannot cut a JPG. An embroidery machine cannot stitch a screenshot. A screen cannot be burned from a 600px logo pulled off a website.</p>

<p>So the requirement does not disappear when it goes unpublished. It moves. Somebody in the shop opens the file the customer sent, sees it is unusable, and either redraws it, sends it to an art service, or writes the awkward email asking for something better.</p>

<p>That is the real finding here. The artwork problem is not mostly a customer-education problem that shops have solved by publishing specs. For roughly 19 out of 20 shops it is an internal cost absorbed quietly, one file at a time.</p>

<h2>Only 1.4% publish an art fee</h2>

<p>623 shops in the corpus publish an art or setup charge. Shops that do charge tend to land between $25 and $60 a file, which matches what outside art services quote.</p>

<p>The gap between 1.4% publishing a fee and 10.8% mentioning that they vectorize artwork is the interesting one. Roughly eight times more shops say they fix files than say they charge for it. Some of that is fees quoted per job rather than published. A good deal of it is work given away.</p>

<h2>What we would do with this if we ran a shop</h2>

<p>Two things, and neither requires new equipment.</p>

<p><strong>Publish the requirement.</strong> Being in the 5.4% costs nothing and moves a share of the problem back to where the artwork came from. A single line on the quote page does most of the work: "artwork as .ai, .eps or .svg; anything else may need a setup charge."</p>

<p><strong>Decide what a bad file costs you, then price or automate it.</strong> Half an hour of a decorator's time is not free, and an outside art service at $25 to $60 a file is not free either. If the volume is a handful of files a month, absorbing it is reasonable. If it is several a week, it is a line item pretending not to be one.</p>

<h2>Method, and what this does not measure</h2>

<p>The corpus is 44,931 decorating businesses with a public website, collected from business listings across the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland. Each site's homepage and, where linked, its contact, about and requirements pages were read and matched against phrase patterns for each signal.</p>

<p>Two honest limits. This measures what shops <em>publish</em>, which is a floor rather than a true rate: a shop that charges an art fee only when quoting will not appear in the 1.4%. And phrase matching misses wording it was not built for, so every figure here should be read as "at least".</p>

<h2>If you are one of the 42,498</h2>

<p>Converting a customer's logo into something a machine can run is what <a href="/vector-art">VectoSolve</a> does. AI and EPS for Illustrator, DXF for the laser, DST, PES and JEF for the hoop, G-code for the router, off the same file. There is a free watermarked preview on the tool if you want to throw the worst file on your desk at it and see what comes back, and a shop plan at $99 a month if the answer turns out to be useful more than four times.</p>

---

*Maintained by VectoSolve. When citing, link to https://vectosolve.com/blog/what-print-shops-ask-customers-for-artwork-data.*

*VectoSolve — AI-powered SVG platform: image-to-vector conversion, AI animation, brand identity generation, and more. https://vectosolve.com*