The economics of shirt printing
Blank shirts are great and all, but most people want some kind of design on their shirts. After all, having designs on your shirts is an excellent way to increase your clothes's appeal, and gives you a convenient way to display a respresentation of yourself and your tastes.
However, designs cost money to print onto shirts. This guide is intended to inform you a little more about the costs associated with printing designs onto shirts.
There are 2 main ways that designs get on shirts. They are screen printing and digital printing.
If you want to understand either of these unique styles of printing more in depth, check out
Perhaps the biggest factor in determining how much the cost is to print a design on a shirt is how many colors a print will require.
Usually, on most shirts you find at stores the design on it is either only 1 or 2 colors. That's because when a shirt design only requires a small number of solid colors to print, it can be done through screen printing. Screen printing has a large overhead fee for setting up the print, but after the setup is complete, the actual printing process is very cheap. Custom t-shirts that are produced in mass quantities really love screen printing because after the initial setup is complete, each print ends up being very cheap.
However, for people who feel a bit more luxurious, there are also many shirts available that include many colors on them. For colorful shirts, or shirts that have a gradient (a shadowing effect), more often than not they will be digitally printed. A digital print differs from screen printing in that there is no setup cost. However, the cost of each print is considerably more expensive than the cost of a screen print. For that reason, shirt-printers who want to make the same shirt design on a large scale often prefer screen printing, as the cost of producing the print is much cheaper than digital printing. Digital printing is more suited towards orders in smaller quantities, but allows a unlimited use of colors.
In terms of quality, while both are very good, screen printing usually comes out a little better. Screen printing adds each color to the shirt design one at a time (hence it's used primarily for shirts with only a couple solid colors for the design) using a stencil, a screen, and ink. This process ends up bonding the ink the shirt both strongly and smoothly for a great high quality print.
However, don't let this make you look down on digital printing. Digital printing takes advantage of modern technology to directly imprint a design on a garment. The print comes out thin, so that you can barely distinguish between the ink and the shirt itself. It maintains the shirt's breathability while putting a design on the shirt.
To sum it up, custom shirts with only a couple of solid colors are probably screen printed, which usually has an overall less cost to manufacture than digital prints. Shirts with a gradient or many colors are probably going to be digitally printed, which will drive up the cost of the shirt because it costs more to print.
But regardless of
whether the shirt has been screen or digitally printed, with modern technology, you shouldn't have to worry too much about the quality of the design, as it will usually come out great.