How Much Do Custom T-Shirts Cost? What Moves the Price

If you’re trying to find out what custom t-shirts cost, I’ll be straight with you. Nobody can give you a real number from a blog post, and that includes me. What I can do is tell you exactly what decides that number, so when you do get a quote none of it is a surprise, and so you don’t spend money on things that aren’t worth what they cost you.

What actually moves the price

Five things do most of it: how many pieces you order, how many ink colors are in the design, how many places we print, which garment you pick, and any specialty inks like metallic or glitter. That list is on our what to expect page, along with our turnaround.

Here’s the part that list doesn’t explain. Every ink color in your design is a separate screen, and every location we print is a separate setup on the press. So a six-color front is six screens. Add a back and you’re not adding a little, you’re adding a whole second setup. At a lot of shops that shows up as its own screen or setup line on your quote. You won’t see that line on ours, it’s already in the per-piece price. It’s still the reason color count and print locations move your number more than almost anything else.

The one people really don’t expect is sizes. Most garment manufacturers charge more for 2XL and up. Some don’t. That’s the blank maker’s upcharge and not our print, which means you can look it up in the catalog before you commit to a size run. The blanks we print on most are on our garments page.

The two ways people spend more than they meant to

Both of these come from trying to get a better deal.

The first is piling on the design. Somebody sends me a six-color front, a back, both sleeves and neck labels, and asks what it costs for 12 pieces. There’s no method that makes that cheap. DTF would come out cheaper than screen printing on a run that small, and it would still be expensive per shirt, because the cost is in how many places we’re printing, not in which method we use. Where DTF genuinely beats screen printing is on our DTF vs screen printing page.

If your budget matters more than the extra locations, drop the sleeves and the neck label. One or two colors on the front, printed well, on a garment people actually want to wear, beats a six-color everything you couldn’t afford enough of.

The second is ordering too many too early. People go big on a first run trying to get the price per shirt down. If you’ve never sold this design, or you’ve never done merch at all, that’s how you end up with boxes in the garage. The per-piece price really does come down as the quantity goes up. It just isn’t worth much if the shirts don’t move. We don’t have minimums, so a small first run is fine by us.

Once it’s working, order fewer times

This sounds like the opposite of what I just said. The thing that changes is whether the design is proven.

If you’re reordering the same art over and over, ordering 24 every time is the expensive way to do it. If you have the money and the room to store them, order 48 or 72 instead. Bigger runs cost less per piece, so consolidating your reorders softens your overall cost. That’s for a design you already know sells, not one you hope will.

Nobody can tell you your number, including me

How many you should order depends on things I don’t know about you. How big your company is. Whether you’ve done merch before or this is your first time. Who your audience is. Whether you’re selling these or giving them away. A brand new label testing a design and a company buying shirts for forty employees are not the same problem, and no average from a blog post covers both.

What everyone who gets this right does is the same, though. Start with a real estimate of what your people will actually need. Then track what happened: how many sold, which sizes ran out, which ones sat. Then adjust the next order. The first run is you guessing, and the second run is you knowing. That’s the whole trick and it doesn’t take software.

If you’re reselling them

One thing I see mixed up constantly, and it costs people real money: margin and markup are not the same number.

Say a shirt costs you ten dollars all in and you sell it for twenty. That’s a 100% markup, because you added 100% of your cost. It’s also a 50% margin, because half of what the customer paid is profit. Same shirt, same price, two numbers, both correct. Doubling your cost is the oldest rule in retail and it has a name, keystone pricing.

Where it goes wrong is when somebody reads “50%” and adds 50% to their cost. That ten dollar shirt becomes fifteen instead of twenty, and they’ve given away a third of the profit they thought they were making, on every single unit.

Count everything when you work out that cost, too. The blanks, the printing, the upcharge on the big sizes, shipping the goods to you, and whatever your selling channel takes off the top. Whatever you sell through is going to take a cut, and it comes out of the same margin.

Getting an actual number

Send it through our quote form: what garment and roughly how many of each, the date you need them, and the art, even if it’s only a sketch or a logo file. Tell us how many colors and where you want it printed. You’ll get a quote back with your proof on it, usually within one business day. If the number is higher than you hoped, tell us your budget and we’ll tell you what to change. It’s usually a location or a color, not the whole idea.

If you already have the shirts and just need them printed, read customer-supplied garments first.