The latest edition of County Business Patterns was recently released, which includes 2022 data.
As 2022 began, there were 5,800 establishments in NAICS 323113 (Commercial Screen Printing). This represents an increase of 30% since 2010, the only commercial printing category that has seen a steady (or any) growth in establishments. The growth in this category is thanks to the rise of specialty printing. Screen is commonly used to print on textiles (T-shirts being the emblematic example), and these kinds of promotional items really started to take off in the past decade. Couple this with the rise of short-run and digital technologies that can complement screen, and as demand for specialty items has increased, establishments have grown to take advantage of this hot print application area. It’s very common to find hybrid screen/digital shops, and even hybrid screen/digital workflows for the same products—kind of like the “digital printing on offset shells” approach that used to be very popular (and still exists to a large extent) among commercial printers. And let’s also not forget the growth of industrial printing, in which screen and pad printing also play a very large role.
Small shops (1 to 9 employees) still comprise the bulk of the screen printing industry, accounting for 74% of all establishments. The largest shops account for only 4% of industry establishments with mid-size shops accounting for just under one-fourth of establishments. These percentages have not varied substantially since at least as far back as 2010, although in the past year we saw a few percentage point drops in the largest and smallest categories and a slight expansion of mid-size shops.
These counts are based on data from the Census Bureau’s County Business Patterns. Throughout this year, we will be updating these data series with the latest CBP figures. County Business Patterns includes other data, such as number of employees, payroll, etc. These counts are broken down by commercial printing business classification (based on NAICS, the North American Industrial Classification System):
- 323117 (Books Printing)
- 32312 (Support Activities for Printing—aka prepress and postpress services)
These data, and the overarching year-to-year trends, like other demographic data, can be used not only for business planning and forecasting, but also sales and marketing resource allocation.
This Macro Moment…
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, December inflation was up 0.4% from November, and up 2.9% year over year. The biggest contributor was energy; the index for gas rose 4.4% in December.
The index for all items less food and energy rose 0.2 percent in December, after increasing 0.3 percent in each of the previous 4 months. Indexes that increased in December include shelter, airline fares, used cars and trucks, new vehicles, motor vehicle insurance, and medical care. The indexes for personal care, communication, and alcoholic beverages were among the few major indexes that decreased over the month.
Still not terrible, and about what economists were expecting.
