How much does it cost to print custom t-shirts?

So you're thinking about printing some shirts and curious about the price. In this blog, we are going to walk through everything that goes into generating a price for your project, what you can do to keep costs down, and things to be on the lookout for.

There are thousands of different garments that can be printed, but to keep things simple I am going to use our house brand t-shirt. It is a cotton polyester blend unisex crew neck.

Ok, let's get into the pricing:

1. How many do you need? 

The quantity of garments makes a big impact on the price. The reason being is how the shirts are printed. Before each print, screens will need to be created for your design. This includes separating out the colors in the artwork, printing films, using those films to make multiple screens (one per color), exposing each screen to light, rinsing out the screens to show the design, letting them dry, taping out the sides so ink doesn't get on the apparel where it shouldn't be, and then each screen needs to be aligned in the press perfectly so that the design actually prints correctly! And then AFTER everything is printed, each screen needs to be torn down, washed thoroughly, and reclaimed.

Whew.. that was a mouthful (sorry!). The "cost" of all that labor will be spread over the total number of shirts you order. Long story short, that process is the same if you want 20 shirts or if you want 2000 shirts. The more custom shirts you order, the lower the cost per shirt. Did we mention we also offer numerous price breaks. The first being from 20-49, 50-99, and 100+.

2. How many colors is your design?

Like I mentioned above, screens need to be made for EACH color. So, the more colors that are in your design, the more screens need to be made. The more screens there are, the more time it takes to print, the more setup is needed, and the more clean up is needed after printing. Every shop does this a little different so I'll just tell you how we do it, for each color, we add $2/shirt. 

3. How many places do you want the design printed? 

Just looking to print on the front of the shirt? Or just on the back? No worries. The price doesn't change. Looking to add a design to the front AND the back? That will increase the price because we have to print the front, run the shirt through the dryer, print on it again, and then run it through the dryer again. There is a small increase in the price simply to cover the extra labor needed to do multiple prints. To see a list of where our shirts can be printed, check out this blog. 

Ok, so now that you know WHY the price changes, the next thing to do is use our pricing calculator to calculate your price per shirt! This will do all of the calculations for you and make sure you are getting the price breaks we talked about. Just adjust the calculator below to your specifications. And, if you need something more custom or with a lot of shirts included, we can help with that too! Just fill out this form and we can get your price for your custom apparel.