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!

According to the World Wildlife Fund (at panda.org):

“The current production of cotton is not only environmentally unsustainable, it undermines the necessary conditions for future cotton production.”

Because the cotton plant is especially susceptible to insect infestations, conventional cotton production uses large quantities of highly toxic pesticides. Conventionally grown cotton is very pesticide intensive, consuming up to 25% of the world’s pesticides while only taking up 3% of the earth’s farmland. The chemicals used are very toxic, rendering the farmland unusable after several harvests if they are not rotated with alternate crops on a regular basis.

According to HAE NOW, a producer of organic cotton garments:

“A year 2000 USDA study revealed that eighty-four million pounds of pesticides were sprayed on cotton in the U.S.A, ranking it second behind corn. Some of these toxic chemicals include the infamous defoliant Paraquat and insecticides like Parathion which is 60 times more toxic that DDT! In fact, the EPA considers 7 of the top 15 pesticides used on cotton as “likely” or “known” human carcinogens.”

In addition to the environmental benefits of using organic cotton, there are quality implications too. The shirts we chose to use for ShirtsForBands.com clients are a very clean knit garment, they are comfortably tapered, and overall a very high quality product. We’re in love with them, they line our own closets. The knit of the fabric is very tight and nice, and the collars are seamless. Killer tshirts.

I’m wearing one now.

Normally organic tshirts are more costly than regular shirts, but ShirtsForBands.com has changed that equation by removing the unsustainable industry standard Gildan 2000 from its screen printed product offerings and replacing them with Anvil Organic Tees at the same price. Starting at $5! We’re all pretty stoked about it.

Check out the 100% organic cotton tee option under screen printed apparel in our design lab!