Cheap custom shirts without cheap results

We sell a shirt at $8.20 and a shirt at $17.00 and both are honest prices for what they are. The question is not which is cheaper; it is which one is cheap in a way you will not regret in March.

Start with the blank, because it is the whole decision

Printing cost barely moves between garments. The blank is where your money goes, so this is the only lever worth pulling hard.

Our Tultex Fine Jersey at $8.20 is a real shirt and not a compromise for the wrong job. Handing out shirts at a street fair, printing a stack for a one-day volunteer crew, making something people will wear twice — buy the Tultex and spend nothing more.

Staff uniforms worn weekly for a year are a different calculation. A Gildan Ultra at $11.20 or a Next Level 3600 at $15.00 holds its shape through repeated industrial washing in a way a lightweight jersey does not, and if the shirts are worn by people who meet customers or get photographed in them, the heavier blank is doing a job that has nothing to do with how many washes it survives. Paying $7 more per shirt once beats reprinting the order in May.

The mistake is picking the cheapest blank for a garment somebody will live in. Nobody notices the saving and everybody notices the shoulders after six washes.

Quantity, if you have any flexibility

Discounts land at 20, 50 and 100 pieces: 10%, 17% and 25%. The jumps are steep enough to be worth a look at your count.

If you need 18 shirts, price 20. If you need 44, price 50 and keep the spares — six extra Gildans at the 17% rate cost less than reordering four shirts later at full price plus shipping.

Where saving money backfires

Two places, and both are cheap in the bad sense.

The first is artwork. A logo pulled off a website at 400 pixels wide will print at 400 pixels wide, which is to say badly. You cannot save your way around resolution. The fix costs nothing here — our design team rebuilds files at no charge — so there is no reason to print a bad file. Send it and ask.

The second is rushing a deadline you could have planned. Overnight shipping on a hundred shirts is real money, and a courier inside New York is $44. An order placed a week out ships standard at two to five business days and costs you nothing extra. Decide early and the saving is free.

Things that do not reduce the price

Worth saying so you do not bother:

Fewer colours. A one-colour design and a photograph cost the same on DTG. Flattening your artwork to save money saves nothing; it only makes the shirt worse. This is the opposite of how screen printing prices work, which is why the habit persists.

A smaller print. Ink is not the cost. An 11-inch chest print and a 3-inch pocket-sized one are the same price, so print the size that looks right.

Front only instead of front and back does save, because that is two prints instead of one. That one is real.

What a sensible cheap order looks like

Fifty Tultex tees, one-sided print, artwork sent a week ahead, collected from the shop. That is 17% off a $8.20 shirt with no shipping and no design charge — about $340 for fifty printed shirts.

Browse the blanks on the catalogue, or the tee comparison if you want the weights and fits side by side before you commit. The blanks guide says which one we would pick for which job, and the bulk article has the discount thresholds in full.