Custom Ink Pricing vs RVA Threads

The Comfort Colors 1717, One Color Front

The 1717 is the heavyweight garment dyed tee that shows up on almost every brewery, coffee shop and band merch table in the state. It is a premium blank and it is not cheap to buy, which makes it a fair test. There is nowhere for a printer to hide margin in a bargain shirt.

At 24 pieces, Custom Ink comes to $15.26 per shirt. We come to $13.49. At 50 pieces they are $14.65 and we are $10.74. At 100 pieces they are still $14.65 while we drop to $9.99. At 250 pieces they move to $14.55 and we are at $9.49.

The per piece gap is worth looking at, but the order total is where it lands. Fifty shirts is $732.50 with them and $537 with us, a difference of $195.50. One hundred shirts is $1,465 against $999, so you keep $466. Two hundred fifty shirts is $3,637.50 against $2,372.50, which is $1,265 that stays in your budget for something else.

Notice what happens to their curve. Between 50 and 250 pieces their price moves ten cents. Ours drops a dollar and a quarter. That is the part that matters if you print more than once a year.

The 1567 Hoodie, One Color Front

Fleece is where the spread really opens up, because a garment dyed hoodie is expensive to buy and every extra layer of markup compounds on top of a bigger number. The Comfort Colors 1567 is the hooded version of that same garment dyed line.

Custom Ink prices it at $59.50 per piece at 24, $58.25 at 50, $57.70 at 100 and $57.40 at 250. Our pricing on the same hoodie with the same one color front print is $38.79 at 24, $36.04 at 50, $35.29 at 100 and $34.79 at 250. That is roughly $21 to $23 off every single hoodie.

On 50 hoodies that is $2,912.50 with them against $1,802 with us, a difference of $1,110.50. On 100 hoodies it is $5,770 against $3,529, so $2,241 back. On 250 it is $14,350 against $8,697.50, which is $5,652.50. For a lot of the organizations we print for, that gap is the entire rest of the program.

Why The Numbers Land Where They Do

Every price includes the shirt and the printing. Fleece takes more handling and more ink, so hoodies and crewnecks carry a small garment and print adjustment that is already built into the figures above.

A national printer is carrying a different set of costs. Television and search advertising, a sales floor, multiple facilities, layers of staff between you and the person holding the squeegee. None of that is wasted money exactly, but it all rides on top of your shirt, and it shows up as a garment marked up two or three times over what the blank actually costs.

The other half of it is that our price breaks are real breaks. Our matrix steps down at 24, 50, 100, 250 and 500 pieces, and each step is a meaningful drop rather than a rounding adjustment. Print more, pay less, in a way you can actually feel on the invoice.

Who Is Actually Printing Your Shirts

Here is the part most people ordering from a national site do not think about. A company that size is largely a middleman. The order gets taken online and then routed out to contract screen printing shops that do the actual work, which means the people pulling your prints never speak to you, never see your feedback, and are not the people you would call if something came back wrong. You also do not get to choose them.

When you order from us, the shop is the whole company. Your job is printed by the same person who answered your email and approved your artwork, and nothing goes in a box without someone looking at it under the lights first. A reprint here comes straight out of our own pocket, so nothing marginal gets shipped and hoped for.

How Long It Takes To Get A Price

Cost is only half of what makes a printer easy to work with. The other half is how quickly you can answer the question your boss or your treasurer is going to ask, which is what is this going to run us.

On our site, you open the catalog, pick a garment, type in a quantity, tell it how many ink colors are on the front, and flip on a back print if you need one. Every number on the page updates as you go. Change from one color to two and you watch the per piece price move in real time. Add a back and the same thing happens. You can price three different garments and four different quantities in the time it takes to finish a cup of coffee, and nobody has to email you anything.

Getting a comparable figure out of Custom Ink is a longer road. You have to be on an individual product page, click through to request a quote, fill in your details, clear a CAPTCHA, and wait. Want to compare that garment against a different one, or see what happens at a different quantity? Start over on the next product page. It is not difficult, exactly, but the time adds up fast when you are trying to build a budget rather than place a single order.

We built the catalog the way we did because most of our customers are pricing a project before they have approval to spend anything. Making somebody submit a form to find out whether a number is even in range is a poor trade for everyone involved.

What You Give Up, And What You Do Not

Being straight about it, a national printer does have a few things a smaller shop does not. Round the clock phone support, a design studio staffed with artists, and the ability to absorb a rush order that would swamp a small press. If you need artwork created from nothing, that is genuinely not what we do. We prep and clean up files for print, but we are not a design agency.

What you get instead is the person who prints your shirts answering your emails. The artwork on every job is checked before the screens are ever burned, and if something looks wrong on a proof you are talking to the one who can fix it rather than opening a ticket.

The published figures here are current as of the date on this article. Blank costs move with distributor pricing, so any quote gets confirmed at the time we invoice. Our minimum is 12 pieces, shipping is free anywhere in Virginia, and turnaround runs two to three weeks from a paid invoice.

Run Your Own Comparison

Do not take our word for any of it. Pull up whatever printer you were already considering, price the exact garment and print you want, then run the same specs through the catalog and hold the two numbers next to each other. That is the only comparison that means anything, because it is your order rather than an example.

If the garment you want is not one of the two above, the same math generally holds. The gap tends to widen as the garment gets more expensive and as the quantity climbs, which is exactly when it matters most.