Three numbers set your price

Every screen printing quote is built from the same three inputs. The blank garment you're printing on, the number of ink colors in each spot you're printing, and how many pieces you're ordering. Nothing else moves the number much.

We don't mark up blanks. You pay what the garment costs us and we make our money on the printing, which is why the shirt you pick moves your price dollar for dollar. A Gildan Softstyle and a Comfort Colors garment dyed blank are two different shirts at two different costs, and that gap carries straight through no matter how many you order. Fleece is the one exception, and there's a section on it below.

Ink colors matter because of how the press works. Each color in your design is a separate screen, burned separately, loaded onto its own arm, and printed as its own pass. A four-color design takes four times the screen prep and four times the setup that a one-color design does. That's the whole reason color count shows up in the price.

Quantity is the biggest lever by a wide margin. The setup work is the same whether you're printing 12 shirts or 500, so spreading it across more pieces drops the per-shirt cost fast. Going from 12 pieces to 50 on a one-color job cuts your per-shirt price roughly in half.

Build your own quote right here

Pick a shirt, set your ink colors in each location, and enter a quantity. This runs the same pricing engine as our full quote calculator, so what you see here is what we'd invoice, before Virginia sales tax.

What quantity does to the number

Here's a real example, printed all the way out. This is a Gildan 64000 Softstyle tee, the least expensive blank we stock, with a front print only. Every price is the all-in cost per shirt in sizes S through XL. No setup fees are hiding underneath it.

Look down the first column. A one-color shirt costs $13.25 at 12 pieces and $8.25 at 50. That's a 38 percent drop for ordering 38 more shirts, and it's the reason we tell people to count heads twice before they place the order. If you're at 44 pieces and thinking about 50, the extra six shirts are close to free.

The other thing worth noticing is what happens at the top of the table. At 12 to 23 pieces, every added color costs $4 per shirt. At 500 pieces, it costs 55 cents. Small runs pay for setup, big runs don't.

Ink colors are the second lever

An ink color is any distinct color of plastisol in your design. A black logo with red text is two colors. A white outline around that same logo makes it three. The color of the shirt never counts, which is why a white design on a navy tee is a one-color job even though you see two colors on the finished piece.

Gradients, photographs, and anything with soft fades are the expensive ones. Those get simulated with halftones and usually need four or more colors to look right, sometimes on top of a white underbase if the shirt is dark. If you're working to a budget and your design has a gradient in it, that's the first place to look for savings.

If you have Pantone numbers, send them with your art. A spec'd PMS number is the fastest, most accurate path to the color you're picturing, and we'll mix plastisol to match it. If all you have is a hex value, a printed piece, or an old shirt, we can still work from that, but pulling a match off a photo or a screen color takes longer and lands closer to the color than dead on it. Either way there's no color matching fee.

Adding a back or sleeve print

Second and third locations are cheaper than the first one. The shirts are already ordered, the art is already prepped, and the setup on an additional spot is less involved than starting from scratch. We price additional locations at half the one-color rate for your quantity tier, plus the difference for any extra colors in that spot.

A small left chest print with a big back print is the most common layout we run, and on a 50 piece order it lands at $10.75 per shirt on a Softstyle blank. Sleeve hits are priced the same way as backs. If you want the same design in two spots, that still counts as two locations, because it's still two setups and two passes.

The shirt you pick sets the floor

Printing costs the same on every garment, so the difference between an $8 shirt and a $26 shirt is the blank underneath and nothing else. We pass those blanks through at cost. Here's what a range of our regular stock looks like with the same spec on all of them, 50 pieces with a one-color front print.

Fleece is the one place we add to the garment price, $3.50 on the blank and $1.50 per print location. Hoodies and crewnecks are heavier, they're slower to load and unload on the press, and they take longer through the dryer. That's already baked into every fleece number in the table above.

Blank costs move. Distributors reprice, styles get discontinued, and colors go in and out of stock, so treat every number on this page as current for the date at the top and not locked forever. We confirm real pricing on your specific styles and colors when we build the invoice, and if something has moved we tell you before you pay anything.

If the shirt you want isn't on that list, it's almost certainly available. We print anything our distributors carry, which is most of the industry. Send us a style number and we'll price it.

2XL, 3XL, and mixed sizes

Sizes S through XL are all one price. Extended sizes cost more because the blank costs more, not because the printing changes. On cotton tees the 2XL upcharge usually runs $1.40 to $1.60 and 3XL runs $2.70 to $2.90. On fleece it's higher, closer to $1.65 to $2.25 for 2XL depending on the style.

You can mix sizes freely inside a design without affecting your quantity tier. Eight mediums, four larges, and a couple of 2XLs is one order of 14 pieces at the 12 to 23 price. You can also mix garment styles and shirt colors in the same order and the combined count still drives the tier, which is how a lot of teams end up with tees and hoodies on one invoice.

What isn't in the number

There are no setup fees, no screen fees, and no art fees on standard jobs. There's also no markup on the blanks. You're paying what the garment costs us plus the printing, which is the part we actually do. Re-orders of a design we've already printed cost the same as the first run at the same quantity, and they still have to hit the 12 piece minimum.

Shipping is free anywhere in Virginia. Out of state ships by weight and destination. Virginia sales tax of 6 percent gets added at invoicing unless you send us a tax exempt certificate, which schools, churches, and a lot of non-profits have. Turnaround is about two to three weeks from a paid invoice, and rush work is possible if you tell us the date early.

Two things can move a quote after you get it. The first is artwork review, where we confirm the actual color count in your file, since designs sometimes have more colors in them than people expect. The second is a dark garment needing a white underbase, which counts as an ink color on the press and gets flagged before we invoice.

Where the real savings are

If you're trying to get the number down, quantity is where to spend your effort. Every other lever is small next to it. Add the sizes you know you'll want on hand instead of ordering exactly what's spoken for, and check whether you're a handful of pieces away from the next break.

After that, look at color count before you look at garment. Dropping one color on a 24 piece order saves $2 per shirt. Dropping from a Comfort Colors blank to a Softstyle saves $2.75. Those are similar amounts of money, but one of them changes what the shirt feels like and one of them mostly changes how the art was drawn.

Last thing worth saying plainly. A one-color print on a good blank at 50 pieces is one of the better values in custom apparel, and it's what a lot of the work in our gallery actually is. Big color counts look impressive on a mockup, but they're not what makes people wear the shirt.