Can You Print on My Own Shirts? Yes. Here's How It Works

Customers bring us their own garments to print on most weeks. A lot of shops won’t take that work, especially when the garments are polyester. We will. Here’s how it works, including what we won’t print on and what happens when something goes wrong.

What people bring us

Lately it’s been a lot of golf: Footjoy apparel and golf bags. Backpacks, sweatpants, duffels and drawstring bags come in too, and custom-made shirts. Hats are common, and we either press them with DTF or send them out to be embroidered, about equally.

Sometimes it’s nothing special. People just have their own source. One customer knew an owner at a large manufacturer, got his shirts at cost, and shipped them to us to print.

What it costs

You pay our normal print price, and generally nothing extra on top. There’s no minimum.

Send a few extra

Please send 3% more than you need, and at least 2 extra pieces. A garment can get lost in setup or in printing, and the extras mean you still get your full count if that happens.

We count your garments when they arrive. You never pay to print a piece we ruin. If we ruin more than the extras you sent, we replace the garment when we can source it, and when we can’t, we refund or credit what you paid for it. That’s clause 8 of our order terms, which are on every quote and invoice.

One-of-a-kind pieces

A refund doesn’t bring back a vintage shirt. So when something comes in that might be the only one of its kind, we ask. We’ll also ask whether you have samples we can test on first. Sometimes a sample can’t really stand in for the real piece, because the fabric is different or for some other reason.

We do the best we can. What I can’t do is promise, because anything can happen with high heat and wet ink.

Polyester, and which blanks to buy

A lot of the time, polyester is why other shops turn these jobs down. We print a lot of it. The risk is dye migration, where the heat of curing draws dye out of the fabric and tints the ink. If you bring us polyester, I’ll always talk to you about it before we run the job, because I can’t vouch for a blank I didn’t source. There’s more on how it happens on our DTF vs screen printing page.

We don’t tell you which blanks to buy. That’s your call. What you pick does affect how it prints in some ways, but we work with what you bring.

What we won’t print on

Glass and very thin plastic. Plastic in general we’ll do, reluctantly. Rubber is very tricky. Most fabrics are fine, and so are quite a lot of other surfaces.

The hardest one we’ve done

Years ago a major surf brand had two full containers of wetsuits misprinted in China. As far as I know, we were the only shop in the U.S. that could fix them.

The old print had to come off cleanly, residue and all, without damaging the rubber. We tested more than a hundred chemicals before we got there, and it took two or three stages of cleaning and a long drying period, with a couple of thousand suits at a time hanging on racks we built in the warehouse. Then each suit was printed again in two places. Printing a finished wetsuit is a lot harder than printing the panels before they’re sewn, which is how we usually printed wetsuits.

It took me the better part of a month. It’s one of the hardest fixes we’ve ever done.

How we keep your goods straight

When your garments come in, we count them and mark them. Either we mark the box they came in, or we pull them out and tag them with your job. Every job has its own labeled section in the shop, and your goods stay in it until they’re printed.

That separation is what keeps things right. Three or four years ago, two customers had similar items in at the same time, and one of them had supplied their own. The orders got switched, and the wrong print went on the customer’s garments. We bought replacements and reprinted them.

In June I wrote about what it means to hold other people’s property, and admitted we had nothing in writing beyond a line on the invoice. That’s changed. The terms above are on every quote and invoice now.

Printing, pressing and embroidery

Screen printing happens here. Our DTF transfers are made by a partner, and we press them onto your garments here. Embroidery is done by our embroidery partner, so if your job is embroidered, your garments go to them.

Getting your garments here, and back

It depends on the job. You can bring your garments to the shop, ship them to us, or have your supplier ship them straight here. When they’re done, you pick them up or we ship them back. Shipping is usually on you.

Getting a quote

Wherever you are, start with our quote form. Tick the garment types with rough quantities, give us the date you need them in hand, and send the art. In the “Anything else” box, tell us the garments are yours, what they are, and whether any of them are one of a kind.