The team behind ShirtsForBands.com has always been on the cutting edge of digital imaging technologies as they’ve developed over the past decade, but until now there’s never been a reliable, high quality way to reproduce photographic artwork on fabric. That’s all different now, we’ve changed the rules.

Our inks are the ultimate in quality for textile printing, they POP and LAST. We can get brighter yellows, blues and reds than any of our competitors AND we’ll do it for less than they want.

Compare our prices to big name players like cafepress.com and then compare the quality of our TRUE TEXTILE INKS to their low-quality heat transfers (think that wicked Back To The Future tee you had in the 80s) and we blow them out of the water.

Did we mention all our inks and processes are totally eco-friendly? Our production house even RUNS ON WIND POWER and is carbon neutral. Definitely not business as usual.

We’re a small DIY company… a group of friends and fellow musicians, but we’ll put our name up against any of the big brothers out there in the online t shirt world.

Give us a try for your next t-shirt merch order, you won’t be disappointed.

Our shirts aren’t low quality heat transfers like some of the higher priced big players like cafepress.com. Our full color printing is done with the highest quality eco-friendly digital printing plastisol inks. Conventional screen printing using the same ink, but our prints are applied by inkjet technology, instead of the regular old squeegee and screen, drastically reducing the amount of ink required.

This keeps your print “light handed” (which means you can’t feel a heavy layer of ink all over the shirt with your hand). Every shirt off our line comes off exactly the same as the first, colors perfect, and they stay that way for years.

Give full color tshirts a try for your next custom tshirt project!

How you prepare artwork affects the price you’ll pay to get your shirts.
The design you put on your shirt is key. At shirtsforbands.com we use two main printing techniques, screen printing and full color digital printing.

Screen printing is used in designs that have artwork with clearly separated colors. We print up to 4 colors with screen printing, the more colors you have in your design, the more your shirts will cost. This is because for each color, we must make a separate screen and register them, requiring more labor. Unlike our competitors, we keep our screen fees very low ($5 per screen/color), making setup costs less of an issue. Another minor factor that gets a little more technical is flashing. When one color gets printed on top of another color, it must first be partially cured, or flashed so there’s something for the second color to lay on. Our flash charge is low, $0.50 per flash.

Digital printing is full color and therefore can be used with any artwork, even photographs, so there is less to factor in. The only real variable here is if your design uses white as a print color. Full color tshirts without white ink start at about $9.50 and with white ink start at about $13. Why? The white ink used in full color printing can cost up to $1000 a liter.

Click here to learn more about preparing your artwork for custom printed tshirts
Click here to learn how to design custom tshirts with our design lab.

The more shirts you buy, the less they cost.
Supply and demand, baby! It’s simple, our suppliers charge us a set cost for blank shirts. The more we order for a specific job, the easier it is for us negotiate lower pricing for them, which we can pass along to you in the form of a lower price per shirt. The printing also gets cheaper, as the various costs in setting up a job get spread across more shirts, lowering the overall price. For the same reason, we have minimum order amounts. We have to order a certain quantity from our suppliers or we don’t get the good rates which we pass on.

For screen print orders, the minimum order quantity depends on the specific product, but is normally 24 t-shirts (2 dozen). The minimum on hoodies is 12. Our price breaks are at 12, 24, 72 and 240 tshirts. If you are ordering more than 240 t-shirts of a specific design, give us a call and we’ll work out the details.
For full color the minimum order quantity is very low (3 shirts), because we keep these on hand in specific colors.

The type and COLOR of shirt you choose affects price considerably.
At shirtsforbands.com we offer very specific shirts, our primary screen printed t-shirt being an Anvil Organic Cotton t-shirt and our upgraded option is a ringspun Alternative Apparel fitted tee. We’re proud of the fact that we offer the best t-shirts in the industry for the price. For full color printing, we use a high-quality 6.1 ounce Gildan Ultra Cotton.

In addition to the style of shirt, the color is also a factor. Light shirts are less expensive than dark shirts, because dark shirts require 1) more ink and 2) white ink or an underbase. In full color printing, white ink is very expensive and difficult to work with and in screen printing, an underbase (a layer of white ink beneath all the actual design) adds an extra screen/color to the production process.

Dark garments also cost more than light garments, due to the added dye that goes into their production.

So there you have it.
The major variables in getting custom t-shirts printed.

• Artwork
• Quantity
• Shirt Type

Our online design lab takes all of these variables into account and will give you a total before you check out. To get your per-shirt price, just divide the total price by the number of shirts in your order.

<a href=”http://www.shirtsforbands.com/tshirtsforbands/contact”>Contact Us</a> if you have any questions!

Good tshirts define people’s preconceptions of your band too, regardless of what kind of music you play or what kind of gigs you’re trying to get.

Get creative.

We have design tools up to spark your creativity. We have killer artwork, and we loaded it into our designer with the intention of them being design “legos”. Our design tool has the ability to layer artwork on top of artwork, so you can stack design elements on top of each other to make more eye catching designs for your band. That’s the point! Sometimes, merch sells a band more than their music does!

Don’t limit yourself to just a font across a shirt. You’ve got options, use them! While the black tee with white letters will forever be a staple, how many of those shirts can one person own? Generic design has a effect on the onlooker’s eye, kinda like banner ads. They just get overlooked. It has to be something truly unique to grab their attention.

Using more pieces of artwork doesn’t affect the cost of your shirts at all, the only thing that affects price is number of colors. If you use a hundred pieces of art, but they’re all black, it’s the same price as one piece of art.

Making Text Sexy.

You have a lot of options when it comes to fonts, but the possibilities don’t stop there. Our design lab has several special settings you can use to make text more interesting.

Check out the arching tools in the text properties menu. You can shape the path that text curves along by turning on the arch you prefer and modifying its settings. You can also kern letters (change the whitespace between the letters).

Layering Artwork

Look at some of the elements we provide. There are wings and circlets that are supposed to be layered with other pieces. Need a flying skull of death? No problem. As you add new art, they appear as a stack of layers.

Take a wander through our library… we continually add to it, so no matter what your vibe, there will be some artwork to fit it.

When you first add artwork it will default to black, so you will need to change the color of the new art you’ve dropped in.

Keep adding elements until you’ve assembled the design you want, remembering you can move the priority of layers up and down to put them in front of or behind other pieces of art.

Don’t Forget The Back!

With our design lab, you can adjust artwork for multiple print locations, depending on what garment you’re working on designing. For a regular tshirt, you can print on the front or the back (sleeves coming soon). Just swap the location. Your old artwork will be kept intact. Keep in mind, multiple print locations affects price.

Wrap It Up!

When you’re finally satisfied with your design, do a quick review.

Then save your design. This logs your artwork into our database, so you can always get to it, if you need to reorder more merch later. We keep your layouts forever, and you can even add designs that you haven’t even ordered yet, so you can make a few designs and then consult with the other members in your band before deciding which designs to go with.

Ready To Get Started?