Here at Designashirt.com we receive many types of orders from sports teams, to charity events, to clothing line start-ups, and of course single order prints. In order to get the most bang for your buck on your order there are several factors to keep in mind:
The desired product you are printing on (Hanes, American Apparel, Champion ect.)
The number of shirts you want to print.
The number of colors in your print, and if the print is on both front AND back.
We utilize two separate methods of printing: direct to garment printing (DTG) and screen printing. Each method has pros and cons and we carefully consider which method is best for each order we receive. We have two 1-minute videos that give an overview of each printing technique, Screen Printing and Direct to Garment
The advantage of DTG printing is that we can print a great deal of colors on a shirt at the same time. It works almost like a big computer printer, but for shirts! There is minimal setup time so a printer can motor through hundreds of different prints in a single day! The biggest drawback for digital print is that the ink needed is pricy, so it is not cost effective for large order runs. Also the DTG printer only prints one shirt at a time, which means each shirt must be loaded and cured before the next piece can be started.
The biggest advantage of screen printing is that once the screens are up and ready the shirts start flying off the presses! Each color gets its own screen which means the more colors in the order, the longer it takes to set up the printing press. If the order calls for a large quantity then the set up time for several colors becomes justified because once the press is up and running it easily outpaces the speed of DTG printing. Screen printing is fast, effective, and perfect for large orders with any number of colors. We have even completed an 6-color order of 80,000 shirts all on our automatic printing presses!
So what does all this mean for ordering your shirts? Essentially it means that we are capable of printing anything you desire, it just depends on quantity and number of colors that determine if we will use DTG or screen print. The easiest way for you to save per item is to increase the quantity of shirts ordered. Generally (depending on color number) orders of 12 or more move from DTG to screen print and the cost to print is reduced. This means that if you are thinking of printing up 10 shirts it might be more cost effective to boost the order to 12. As always our standard shipping is free, but if you want to save even more money you can choose our Super Saver Shipping option upon check out. We look forward to creating your rocking custom design T-shirt and shipping it off lighting fast!