Custom T-Shirts: Screen Printing, Embroidery and Private Label

Chosen by artwork, quantity and fabric

The single most useful question at the start of a custom order is not which method looks best — it is what the artwork physically is. Flat spot colours, a photograph, a line drawing, metallic foil and a raised patch all take different routes through the shop, and two of them cannot run on the same fabric.

Quantity decides the rest. Every process carries a setup cost that has to be spread over the run: a screen, a digitised file, a transfer sheet, a pre-treatment. Below a certain quantity the setup dominates and the per-piece price stops being a price and becomes a fee. Above it, the process with the lowest setup wins.

Fabric matters more than most buyers expect. A 160gsm jersey stretches under a heavy ink deposit; a 350gsm garment-dyed body shrinks and relaxes in ways that move a print. We fix the weight before the decoration, not after.

The six methods we run

Screen printing is the workhorse for one to four spot colours. Ink is pushed through a mesh screen, one screen per colour, then cured. It is the cheapest per piece above roughly fifty units and the most durable finish on cotton. It cannot reproduce a photograph, cannot do gradients, and every extra colour adds a screen and a setup.

Embroidery is the choice for logos that have to survive industrial washing. Thread sits on top of the fabric, so it outlasts any print. On knit fabric it needs backing to stop the garment puckering, and detail below about 2 mm is lost — a logo designed for print usually has to be redrawn for embroidery.

DTG, direct to garment, prints with water-based ink straight into the fabric. No screens and no setup, so it is the right answer for short runs and photographic artwork. On dark colours it needs a pre-treatment and a white underbase, which is why a dark DTG print sits slightly heavier and can fade faster than a screen print.

Heat transfer covers two different things here. A standard transfer prints a full-colour design onto a carrier film and presses it onto the shirt: no setup, any artwork, but a flatter hand feel and a per-piece cost that does not fall with quantity. Reflective transfer is the same route with retroreflective film, used for high-visibility panels on sportswear and streetwear.

Puff transfer uses an expanding ink in the same film process, so the design sits about 0.5–1 mm proud of the fabric. It is a texture rather than a print, and it is deliberately limited: fine lines fill in, so a puff design has to be bold and simple.

Vinyl heat transfer is the simplest route of all: cut letters and numbers from coloured film and press them. It is how names and squad numbers get onto a shirt when the rest is screen printed. There is no setup beyond the cut file, so it costs the same per piece at ten units or a thousand.

The four attribute scales every order is built on

Every style is described on four scales, and each one is a decision the buyer makes, not a property of the factory. They are the vocabulary of the spec sheet, so it is worth agreeing on them before the first sample.

Fit runs slim, standard, slightly loose or loose. This is a pattern decision: it moves chest width, shoulder drop and body length together, and it cannot be adjusted once the fabric is cut.

Thickness runs thin, medium, thick or extra thick, and it is tied to fabric weight. A 160gsm tee is thin whatever is done to it; a 350gsm tee is extra thick and feels stiff until the first wash.

Stretch runs from none through slight to stretch and high stretch. It is a property of the knit, not the decoration. Adding elastane changes drape, recovery and the way a print behaves when the shirt is pulled on.

Softness runs soft, medium, firm or hard. Garment washing, enzyme treatment and yarn type all move this number. It is the attribute buyers notice first and describe worst, which is why it is a four-point scale rather than an adjective.

White tees with decoration

White is the most common base for decoration and the least forgiving: every shading in the print shows, and an off-white blank reads as a mistake next to a true white one. We keep five whites distinct on purpose — optic white, natural, ivory, off-white and cream — because a print approved against one of them looks wrong against another.

Not every white tee order is a production run. A printer who needs two hundred white tees decorated next week, or a brand adding a small embroidered drop to a style already on the shelf, is served from stock: pick a white blank, add the decoration, ship. Small decorated white runs are not the core of what we do, but they are the reason a customer can place a 100 piece decorated order at all instead of the 3,000 the factory minimum would otherwise demand.

Above roughly 10,000 pieces the economics flip back to a factory order: the blank is made to your weight and fit, the white is dyed to a reference, and the decoration runs on the same line.

How decoration is priced

Decoration is quoted with the order, not from a list. Three things move the number: the artwork (how many spot colours, or whether it has to be a photographic process), the print area (an A4 front is not a full back), and the quantity, because the setup has to be spread across the run.

Send the file and the quantity and we come back with a per-piece figure for each method that could run, so the comparison is like for like instead of comparing a screen-print price against a transfer price for different artwork.