Why We Dropped Our Screen Printing Minimum to 12 Shirts

When a small order actually makes sense

Published May 13, 2026

Twelve shirts. Twelve. That's the new minimum for screen printing here. Same presses, same inks, same crew that prints the 500-piece runs. Not vinyl, not heat transfers, not some side operation we set up in the back. Actual screen printing, just at a smaller number than we used to be willing to run. The reason is simple. The question we kept hearing was always the same one. Can you do a few first so I can see how they look. For a long time the answer was no, or yes but with a setup fee that made it not worth it. Now the answer is just yes.

Why a low minimum changes things

This isn't always the cheapest way to buy custom shirts, and we want to say that up front instead of pretending twelve is the same value as five hundred. It isn't. Per piece, twelve will always cost more than a hundred, and a hundred will always cost more per piece than five hundred. That math doesn't change. What changes is whether you can even get the order made without overcommitting on something you haven't seen yet.

Sampling before a big order is the obvious win

Here's the scenario we see most. A company or a band or a school is about to order a few hundred shirts. They've got a design they love. But there are real unknowns. Will the staff actually wear the chosen shirt style, or would they rather have a tri-blend? Will the merch table at the next show sell through a hundred or sit on three hundred? Does the youth small fit the kids on the team the way the parents expect? You don't always know until you've got the shirt in hand. You can't easily walk back five hundred shirts once they're sitting in your garage. Twelve, though. Twelve you can live with. You take those twelve, hand them around, see how people react, see how they move, see what sells and what doesn't. Then you place the bigger order with actual confidence instead of crossed fingers.

When twelve is the whole order

Sometimes the small order is the order. A wedding party. A bachelor trip. A coaching staff. A startup with seven employees and a logo they finally got finished. A neighborhood softball team that doesn't need a single shirt more than the bench is deep. These are the runs where a low minimum stops being a workaround and starts being exactly the right number. You don't need a hundred shirts. You need twelve good ones, printed correctly, that look like a real shirt and not something you ran through a Cricut at home.

One color, one location is where the value lives

If you want the best per-piece deal on a small screen printed run, keep it to one ink color in one spot on the shirt. Left chest, full front, back, doesn't matter where, just one location with one color. At our 12 to 23 tier, a one-color one-location print is ten dollars per piece on top of the garment. Bump up to 24 to 49 shirts and that drops to eight. Cross fifty and it's five. The jump from twelve to fifty cuts the print cost in half, which is the kind of math worth knowing before you order. Every color you add stacks. Every location you add stacks. Two locations isn't double the price, but it isn't free either. So if budget matters more than maximum effect, one color one location is the move. Pick the strongest version of your design and commit to it.

The honest part about minimums

If you know for a fact you need a hundred shirts in three months, don't order twelve now and a hundred later thinking it'll save money. It won't. You'll pay the small-run rate on the first twelve, then the larger-run rate on the second hundred, and the total will be more than if you'd just done a hundred and twelve at once. The low minimum exists for the cases where you genuinely don't know yet. Where the design isn't locked. Where the size breakdown is still a guess. Where you want to wear one before you commit budget to a bigger order. Or for the cases where twelve is the whole population of people who need a shirt and scaling up doesn't apply. We'd rather print you twelve once and a hundred once than have you stuck because the number didn't fit our old minimum.

What the print itself looks like at twelve pieces

The shirts you get out of a twelve-piece run aren't a downgraded version of what we make in larger runs. Same screens get burned. Same Plastisol or water-based inks get loaded. Same press, same flash cure, same conveyor dryer at the same temperature. A twelve-shirt run takes the same setup as a five-hundred-shirt run. We make the screens, mix the inks, register the print on press, test on a scrap shirt, get the first one we like, and then we go. The only difference is when we stop. So a sample order from us is a real sample. What you hold in your hand at twelve pieces is exactly what you'd hold at five hundred. That's the whole reason it works as a test run.

How to actually order a small batch

The same way you'd order a big one. Send us your art, tell us the shirt you want, tell us roughly when you need it. If you're not sure on the shirt style, we can talk through the options and point you toward what's worked well for similar jobs. If you're not sure on the print color, we can walk you through what works on what fabric. You don't need to know Pantone numbers. You don't need vector files necessarily, though they help. Send the best version of your art you've got. We'll tell you if there's an issue and how to fix it. Most of the time there isn't an issue at all. Turnaround depends on where we are in the schedule that week, not on how many shirts you're ordering. Rush jobs are possible. Just ask.

One last thing about smart sampling

If you're planning a big order and you want to sample, here's the move. Order twelve shirts in a mix of the sizes you're actually going to need most. Don't order all mediums to save a few dollars. The whole point of the sample is to see how the shirt fits on a range of people, because the same style sits differently on a small than it does on a 2X. Order the spread, get them on real bodies, then place the bigger order knowing exactly what you're getting. That's what the low minimum is for.