A buyer guide to custom t-shirts & screen printing

Count your sizes before you ask for a price

This is the number one thing that costs groups money. A team of forty is not forty medium shirts. It is a spread, and the spread is never what you guess. Send around a simple list and make people pick their own size. Do not order a stack of mediums and hope. Leftover shirts are money sitting in a box in somebody's garage, and nobody can sell a shirt with last season's date on it. If you truly cannot get everybody to answer, a rough rule for a mixed adult group is that mediums and larges together are usually about half the order, and you will need more 2XL than you think. But a real count beats any rule of thumb every single time.

How many colors are in your design? That number moves the price more than the shirt count

Every color in a design needs its own screen. The screen is made one time and then it prints all day. So one color on three hundred shirts is cheap. Four colors on thirty shirts is not. Most people looking at their own logo guess low. A black outline counts. White counts. That thin gold line under the letters counts. If you are trying to keep the price down, the fastest way is not to cut the shirt count. It is to cut a color.

One color can look like a lot more than one color

People hear one color and picture something plain. That is not how it works. A single ink can be broken into dots, and dots that get bigger and smaller read as shading. That is called a halftone, and it is why an old concert shirt can look like it has depth when only one screen ever touched it. A good one color design usually looks better on a shirt than a full color photo does, and it costs a fraction as much. Ask for it before you assume you need more screens.

What kind of art file actually works

The best thing you can send is a vector file. Those come out of design programs and end in ai, eps, pdf or svg. A vector can be blown up to the size of a barn without going fuzzy, because it is math and not pixels. Next best is a big clean image, at least three hundred dots per inch at the size it will print. What does not work is a screenshot off a phone, a logo pulled from a Facebook page, or a picture of a picture. Those are small and soft, and blowing them up to shirt size only makes the fuzz bigger. If all you have is a rough one, that is fine, it just means somebody has to redraw it.

Nobody expects you to show up with finished art

A napkin sketch, a photo of an old shirt you liked, or a sentence describing what you want is a real starting point. The drawing half of this trade is a trade of its own. What matters is that you know roughly what you want it to say and what feeling you are after. Bring the idea and let the artwork get built from it. You will see a mockup before anything goes on a press, and nothing gets printed until you say it looks right.

Cotton, blends, and why the shirt itself changes the print

A hundred percent cotton shirt takes ink the most predictably. It is the safe pick for most jobs. A fifty fifty blend of cotton and polyester feels lighter, wrinkles less, and holds its shape longer, which is why a lot of work crews like it. A tri-blend feels the softest and drapes the closest to a shirt you would buy for yourself. They do not all print the same, and the difference matters most on dark colored blends, which is the next thing on this list.

Why a red or navy blend shirt can turn a white print pink

This one surprises people. Standard plastisol ink is cured with heat, usually around three hundred twenty degrees. Polyester dye starts to turn into a gas somewhere between about two hundred sixty and three hundred forty degrees. When that happens the dye can move up into the ink sitting on top of it, and a crisp white print slowly goes pink or gray. It is called dye migration. It is not a mistake, it is chemistry. The fixes are real: a lower curing ink run around two hundred ninety to three hundred ten degrees, or a blocking layer printed under the color first. It is worth mentioning your shirt color and fabric when you ask for a price, because it can change how the job is built.

Screen printing, vinyl, DTG and embroidery: which one you actually want

Screen printing pushes ink through a stencil. It wins on quantity. The setup costs something, so it gets cheaper with every shirt after it, and it lasts through years of washing. Heat applied vinyl is a sheet cut into a shape and pressed on. It wins when every piece is different, which is why names and numbers go on that way. Direct to garment sprays ink like a printer. It wins on very small orders and on full color art, and it is the right answer for one or two shirts. Embroidery is thread, not ink, and it is what you want on a cap or a polo where you need it to look formal. Nobody does all four well. Ask what a shop actually runs before you assume.

When you should not order a hundred shirts

If you need two shirts, a bulk shop is the wrong tool and any honest one will tell you so. The screens have to be made whether you print two or two hundred, and you would be paying for all of that setup yourself. Small runs are better handled by direct to garment or by vinyl. The same goes for a full color photograph of somebody's face. That is a different process and it is worth going where they specialize in it. Being pointed somewhere else costs a shop one job and earns it the next five.

How to run a group pre-order without eating leftover shirts

This is how school groups, churches and clubs should do it, and most of them learn it the hard way. Pick one design. Set an order window with a hard closing date. Let every person order and pay inside that window. When it closes, that is your count and your size list, and the whole thing prints as one run at the bulk price. Nobody fronts the money, nobody is stuck with boxes of unsold shirts, and everybody still gets the price that only comes from ordering together. The one rule that makes it work is that the closing date has to be real.

Names and numbers on team shirts do not need a screen each

A common worry is that forty different last names means forty different setups. It does not. The shared design on the front is screen printed once. The part that changes per person goes on afterward in heat applied vinyl. So a full roster with different names and numbers on every back is one screen printing job plus a per piece charge for the personalization. That is why a team order is not nearly as expensive as people brace for.

How long it really takes, and why the clock starts later than you think

For most bulk runs, plan on one to two weeks. The important part is that the clock does not start when you call. It starts when you approve the artwork and hand over a final size count. A week of everybody deciding on the design is a week that is not printing. If you have a hard date, say the date on the first call, not the last one. A rush can sometimes be done, but it costs more and it depends entirely on what is already on the press that week.

The South Texas ordering calendar, and when to actually order

Around here the year has a shape, and every group hits the same weeks at the same time. Back to school and fall sports land in August, so the shirts need to be ordered through July. Football carries the fall, and homecoming and fall fundraisers stack on top of it through October. Playoff shirts are the hardest job in the trade: nobody knows they need them until the game is won, and then everybody needs them in three days. Deer season pulls hunting camp and ranch orders through the late fall. Christmas and church orders fill December. Spring brings banquets, end of season awards, graduation and quinceaneras, so late April and May book up early and you want to be ordering by March. Rodeo and county fair dates run on their own calendar and locals know them better than any list does. Summer is the quiet stretch, which makes it the best time to get a big job done without competing for press time. Whatever your date is, work backward: printing takes one to two weeks once the art is approved and sizes are final, and a group deciding on a design reliably takes longer than the printing does. Two to three weeks ahead is not early, it is on time. If your season is one of the busy ones, call and ask what that week actually looks like before you count on it.

What sun and heat do to a printed work shirt out here

A shirt worn outdoors all day in South Texas is a different life than a shirt worn to a game once a week. Sun fades the fabric around the print as much as it fades the print itself, so an old shirt often looks worn out because the shirt changed, not the ink. Screen printed plastisol is cured into a real layer and it takes that abuse better than a heat pressed transfer, which will start lifting at the corners after enough wash cycles and enough heat. If the shirt is going on somebody who works outside, ask for a heavier fabric and keep the design simple. Fewer, bolder shapes hold up better than fine detail.

How long a screen print actually lasts

Longer than most people expect, and longer than the shirt. There are shirts still in rotation around here that came off this press twelve years ago. In most of those cases the garment wore out first: the fabric went thin, the collar gave up, the shirt color faded in the sun. The printing was still readable. That is what a properly cured plastisol print does. It is not a sticker sitting on the surface, it is a flexible layer cured into the fabric, so it moves with the shirt instead of cracking off it. The look does change. It softens, the edges break up a little, and the whole thing drifts toward the worn in look people pay extra for on purpose. That is the difference between a screen print and a heat pressed transfer, which tends to lift at the corners and peel once it has been through enough hot washes. If you are buying shirts for a crew that will actually wear them, this is the part worth paying for.

How to wash a printed shirt, and what actually wears out first

Turn it inside out. Wash cold. Skip the fabric softener, which coats the fibers and dulls the look. Hang it to dry when you can, because a hot dryer is harder on a shirt than the washing machine ever was. Here is the part people get backward, though. On a properly cured screen print, the ink is not the fragile half. The fabric is. Collars stretch, fabric thins at the shoulders, and the color of the shirt itself fades in the sun long before a good print gives up. So the care advice above is really about making the GARMENT last long enough to keep up with the printing on it.

Ordering in a small town is not the same as ordering in a city

In a metro you are one order in a queue and you will mostly talk to whoever answers. In a small town you are usually talking to the person who will actually print your shirts, which means a question gets a real answer instead of a ticket number. It also means the busy weeks are genuinely busy, because everybody's season lands at once. The practical advice is simple: call earlier than you would in a city, and when you call, you can just explain the situation like a person. You do not have to fill out a form to find out what something costs.

What to have ready when you call for a price

Four things get you a real number instead of a maybe. How many pieces you need. How many colors are in the design, counting the outline and any white. Where it prints, meaning front only, front and back, or a sleeve too. And what kind of garment, meaning a basic tee, a heavier tee, a hoodie or a jersey. If you have your art, say what kind of file it is. With those four answers a price stops being a guess. Without them any number you get is a range, and ranges are how people end up surprised.

Questions people actually ask