Screen Printing

Screen printing pushes ink through a fine mesh screen onto the garment, one screen per color. It's been the backbone of the apparel industry for a century, and it hasn't been replaced because nothing else matches it on two things: hand feel and cost at volume.

A properly cured screen print sinks into the cotton rather than sitting on top of it. It softens with every wash until you can barely feel it, and it outlives the shirt. That's why retail merch, team tees, and anything you're asking people to actually pay for is almost always screen printed.

The trade-off is setup. Each color needs its own screen, burned, washed, mounted, and registered before a single shirt runs. That work costs the same whether you're printing 50 shirts or 500 — which is the whole reason the per-shirt price falls as quantity climbs.

For a one- or two-color print on one location, our pricing runs roughly $12–$17 a shirt at 48–71 pieces, $11–$15 at 72–143, and settles around $9–$12 past 1,000. Those bands span a basic cotton tee up to a softer mid-weight — the blank you choose moves the number more than most people expect.

We don't charge a separate screen or setup fee. Most shops bill $20–$30 per color per location on top of the per-shirt price; ours is built into the rate above. When you're comparing quotes, add any setup line back in before deciding which is cheaper — a $6 shirt with $120 of screen fees on a 60-piece run is really an $8 shirt.

We keep screens on file, so a reorder of the same design goes straight to press. The full breakdown — what drives the price, the fees worth asking any shop about, and how to bring your number down — is in screen printing cost.

Under 48 pieces, we'll quote you DTF instead. DTF printing has no per-color setup at all, so a small run — especially one with a detailed design — costs less and turns around faster. That's the honest answer even though it's usually the smaller sale for us.

Full-color artwork, photographs, or gradients? Also DTF. Screen printing can fake those with halftone dots, but you'll pay for six or eight screens to get there and it still won't look like the file you sent.

Polos, caps, jackets, or anything that needs to look premium? Embroidery. Different cost structure entirely, and thread doesn't crack. We compared the two directly in embroidery vs. screen printing.

Screen printing wants vector art in spot colors — an AI, EPS, or vector PDF where each color is a defined shape, since every color has to be separated onto its own screen. If all you have is a raster file, send it at 300 DPI at full print size with a transparent background.

A standard adult front print runs about 11 to 12 inches wide, and a left-chest hit is usually 3 to 4 inches. Printing white or a light color onto a dark shirt needs a white underbase laid down first so the color doesn't sink in and go dull — that's an extra screen, so it counts as a color.

If your artwork isn't print-ready, send it anyway. We'll tell you straight whether it'll work and we can clean it up or redraw it.