Custom t-shirts with no minimum: how ordering one shirt works

We print one shirt the same way we print two hundred. Here is what it costs, and where the limit actually sits.

Call a screen printing shop and ask for one shirt. You will be told twelve, or twenty-four, and the person on the phone is not being difficult. They are telling you how screen printing works.

Why a minimum exists at all

Screen printing needs a screen for every colour in the design. Somebody burns the screen, lines it up on the press, mixes ink to match, pulls a test, adjusts, pulls another. That is forty minutes of work before a single wearable shirt comes off the press, and it costs the same whether the run is ten shirts or a thousand. Divide forty minutes of labour across six shirts and the price per shirt stops making sense to everybody involved.

So shops set a floor. The floor protects them from losing money, and it is an honest answer to a real constraint.

We print direct to garment instead. The file goes to a Brother GTX, the shirt goes on the platen, and the printer lays the ink down the way an office inkjet lays it on paper. There is no screen to burn and nothing to line up. Shirt number one costs us very nearly what shirt number two costs, which leaves us nothing to protect with a minimum.

What that covers

T-shirts, hoodies, sweatshirts and tote bags: one piece is a real order. You can design a single shirt at two in the afternoon and collect it in Long Island City that evening.

Some items are the exception. A number of heavyweight and specialty blanks, several caps and the larger tote bags start at 6, 12 or more pieces. The catalogue shows the minimum on the item itself, so you see it before you pay rather than at checkout.

What one shirt costs

The blank sets the floor. A few of our common ones, printed, one piece:

Tultex Fine Jersey from $8.20, the cheapest tee we stock
Gildan Ultra Cotton from $11.20
Gildan Softstyle from $12.50
Next Level Cotton 3600 from $15.00, and the one most people end up choosing
Bella+Canvas 3001 from $15.50
Comfort Colors garment-dyed from $17.00, with a 6-piece minimum

Those are single-shirt prices. There is no surcharge for ordering one and no setup line on the invoice.

Volume still helps, it just is not required. Twenty pieces takes 10% off, fifty takes 17%, a hundred takes 25%. The discount applies across the order rather than per design, so a staff order of thirty shirts with eight different names on the back still counts as thirty.

The practical limits

A single-shirt order is not a lesser order, but there are a few things worth knowing before you place one.

Sizes run S through 2XL in unisex cuts. The print area is 14 by 16 inches, and your artwork wants to be at least 150 dpi at the size it will be printed — a logo pulled off a website at 400 pixels wide will look exactly as rough on cotton as it does blown up on screen. PNG with a transparent background is what we would rather have. We accept other formats if the quality is there.

We do not print on sleeves. That one comes up often enough that it belongs here.

And if the artwork is not print-ready, send it anyway. Our design team fixes files at no charge, which on a one-shirt order is most of the value we add.

Ordering one, in practice

Open the t-shirt printing page, pick a blank, drop your file into the designer or send it to us. Before 1 PM on a business day it goes into today's run and you can have it the same day — see same day printing for how that works. After 1 PM, call. Small jobs often still fit.

Standard fulfilment is one to two business days, then UPS takes two to five across the continental US. Pickup is free from either shop: Long Island City in New York, or Compton in Los Angeles.

One shirt. That is the whole order, and it is fine.

The same applies to hoodies, sweatshirts and tote bags. If you are weighing us against a screen printer, the method comparison explains why their minimum exists and ours does not.