Embroidered Shirts

Embroidery looks best on a shirt with some body to it, so the blank you pick decides half of how the logo turns out. There are four families we stitch every week, and each one suits a different job.

Polos are the default for most teams — performance poly for crews and anyone outside in the Arizona heat, cotton pique or a blend for offices and front desks. Our custom polo shirts page goes deep on the fabric choice. Button-ups in twill or poplin are the trades and service-crew standard: they hold a crease, take a name on the opposite chest, and come in long sleeve for sun. Work shirts are the heavier, reinforced version built for job sites, and they get their own custom work shirts page. Outerwear — quarter-zips, vests, softshells, and jackets — is the piece people wear off the clock, and the one they thank you for.

The honest exception is the tee. Thin jersey puckers under a dense logo, so on a basic tee we’d print instead. A small left-chest mark on a heavier ring-spun or blended tee stitches fine — if you’re not sure, send us the tee you have in mind and we’ll tell you straight.

The standard is a left-chest logo about 3 to 4 inches wide. It reads as professional rather than promotional, and it sits right on every size and cut without redrawing anything. On a button-up the name goes on the opposite chest; on a polo it can sit under the logo or on the sleeve.

After that, the additions that earn their keep are a sleeve mark for a second logo, certification, or partner brand, and a back yoke on jackets and button-ups when you want the company name readable from behind. Full-back embroidery is possible but it’s a lot of stitches — that’s usually where we’d suggest a print.

Embroidery handles clean shapes beautifully and struggles with the same things every time: hairline strokes, text under about a quarter inch, and gradients. If your logo has those, we simplify it for thread and show you the sew-out on a mockup before we run a single shirt. How that digitizing step works is all in our logo embroidery guide.

Two things drive the number: the shirt and the stitch count of your logo. Embroidery is priced by stitches, not by how many shirts you buy, so the per-piece price stays fairly flat from 24 pieces to 240 — unlike screen printing, where the price drops steeply with volume. A left-chest logo on a mid-range polo typically lands in the low-$20s per piece all in. A twill button-up or a premium performance brand pushes that up; a simpler logo or a value blank brings it down.

Digitizing is included when you order through a company store or place a bulk order that meets our minimums. Outside that, it’s a one-time charge we quote up front, not a surprise on the invoice. A lot of shops bill setup on every order regardless, so when you compare quotes, add their fee back in first — a $19 shirt with a $75 setup on 24 pieces is really a $22 shirt.

If a quote lands higher than you hoped, the honest lever is the blank, not the stitching. We’ll show you the same logo on a less expensive shirt rather than quietly thinning the embroidery. The full breakdown, including hats and jackets, is in our embroidery cost guide.

A one-time embroidery run starts at 24 pieces, which covers most departments and crews in a single order. Most orders run about two to three weeks from the approved mockup, depending on the garment and stitch count — if you’ve got a hard date, tell us first and we’ll work backward from it.

The harder problem is the person who starts in March after you’ve already ordered. That’s what an online company store solves: your approved shirts, logo, and thread colors sit at a private link, and anyone orders their own size with no minimum at all. Their shirt matches the ones the team got last spring because it’s stitched from the same saved file.

We stitch everything in our own shop in Mesa, Arizona — local pickup for the Valley, shipping anywhere in the country. If you’re still weighing stitched against printed, embroidery vs. screen printing settles it. Otherwise, send us your logo and a headcount and we’ll come back with shirt options, a free mockup, and a straight quote.