Working in Alice
Start with the number that decides everything else: how many pieces. A print job carries two kinds of cost. One happens once no matter what, which is preparing the art, separating the colors, and burning a screen for each one. The other happens per shirt, which is the garment and the ink. That first pile does not care whether you print thirty shirts or three hundred, so the more shirts you spread it over, the less each one carries. Around a hundred pieces the setup stops being the biggest line on your bill. That is why the price per shirt falls hard between thirty and a hundred and then flattens out.
The second number is how many colors are in your design, and most business owners guess low. Every color needs its own screen, and that means a black outline counts, white counts, and the thin second color in your logo counts. If you are trying to hold a budget, cutting one color usually saves more than cutting twenty shirts does. A logo can often be rebuilt to print in two colors and still look like your logo. Ask before you assume you are stuck with what you have.
One Alice order landed on a short clock and still went out on time. That is not the standing promise and it depends on which week you catch the shop, but it has been done. The honest version is this: printing takes about one to two weeks once the artwork is approved and the size count is final. The clock does not start when you call. It starts when those two things are settled, and for most groups the deciding takes longer than the printing does. If your date is fixed, say the date on the first call rather than the last one.
Most of what has come out of Alice so far has been a first order rather than a standing account. For a buyer that is useful to know: there is no long relationship to work around, and a business ordering for the first time gets the same price per shirt as anybody else, because the price comes off the count and the color number, not off history. If you have been ordering online out of habit, it costs nothing to find out what the same shirt runs printed thirty minutes down the road.
One thing worth knowing before you spend money on crew shirts. A shirt worn on a job in this part of Texas lives a hard life, and the sun is usually rougher on it than the work is. What normally happens on an old work shirt is the fabric fades around the print while the printing itself stays put. Screen printed ink is cured into a real layer that flexes with the shirt, so it does not lift the way a heat pressed transfer does after enough hot washes. There are shirts that came off this press twelve years ago still being worn, and in most of those cases the garment wore out first.
A last practical note for anybody buying for a business. Order for everybody at once rather than a few at a time. The count is what sets your price, so two small orders reliably cost more than one combined order of the same total. Most crews land on three to five shirts per person so there is a clean one while the rest are in the wash. When you come back later for more of the same design, the artwork and the color separations already exist, which makes a repeat run cheaper and quicker than the first one. The thing to avoid is waiting until you are completely out, because then you are ordering on a deadline instead of on your own schedule.
Alice is in Jim Wells County, population around 14,500.
What we handle in Alice
Common questions
Is there a minimum order?
The shop specializes in runs of about a hundred pieces and up, which is where screen printing prices really work in your favor. Smaller counts can sometimes be handled with heat applied vinyl or a short run, so ask. If you are close to a hundred, rounding up usually costs less per shirt than you expect.
Why does the per shirt price drop when I order more?
Because the setup is the expensive part. Every ink color in your design needs its own screen burned and registered on the press before shirt one gets printed. Once the press is set, printing shirt two hundred costs little more than printing shirt one hundred, and the quote reflects that.
What is the difference between screen printing and vinyl?
Screen printing pushes ink through a stencil and is the workhorse for a run of identical shirts, which is why it rules bulk orders. Heat applied vinyl is cut per piece, which makes it right for the parts that differ shirt to shirt, like player names and numbers. A typical team run uses both on the same garment.
Ordering shirts for a business, a team or a group in Alice? Call and get a real number for the count you need.