How Much Does Custom Apparel Actually Cost?

What you're really paying for

"How much for 50 shirts?" is the question we hear most, and the honest answer is that it depends on five things. None of them are mysterious. Once you understand how a custom apparel quote gets built, you can steer the price yourself — and you'll know which requests cost real money and which ones are basically free.

Here's the whole picture, the way we'd explain it standing across the counter on Mellwood Ave.

The five things that set the price

1. Garment choice. A basic open-end cotton tee and a ringspun Bella+Canvas or a Patagonia pullover live in completely different price ranges. The blank is often the single largest line item on the quote.
2. Quantity. Setup costs get spread across the run, so your per-piece price drops fast as quantity climbs. 24 is the usual break point; 100+ is where it gets genuinely efficient.
3. Decoration method. Screen printing is cheapest at volume; embroidery costs more but reads premium. Our screen print vs. embroidery guide walks through which one fits your job.
4. Number of ink colors or stitch count. Each additional screen print color is its own screen and its own pass on press. Each thousand stitches is machine time.
5. Print locations. Front-only is standard. Add a back, sleeve, or tag and you've added a location, which means more setup and more handling per piece.

Why quantity changes everything

Screen printing has fixed startup work that happens exactly once no matter how many shirts you order: separating the art, burning a screen for each color, mounting and registering those screens on press, and mixing ink to match your PMS values. That work costs the same whether you print 12 shirts or 1,200.

Spread across 12 pieces, setup dominates the price. Spread across 250, it nearly disappears and you're mostly paying for blanks and labor. This is why jumping from 20 shirts to 50 often barely raises your total but drops your per-piece cost noticeably, and why we'll sometimes tell you to order more shirts to spend less money per shirt. Ask us to quote two quantities side by side — the math usually makes the decision for you.

Colors, darks, and the underbase

Each ink color in a screen print is a separate screen, a separate setup, and a separate pass. A one-color left-chest logo is the cheapest thing we print. A six-color full-front illustration is not.

Dark garments add one more wrinkle: ink is translucent, so colors printed straight onto a black or navy tee go muddy. The fix is a white underbase printed first, flashed dry, then the colors printed on top. That underbase behaves like an extra color — extra screen, extra pass, extra cost. It's why the same design frequently prices higher on black than on white.

Poly and poly-blend garments can also require low-cure inks or a blocker underbase to prevent dye migration, where dye in the fabric bleeds up into the print and turns your white ink pink over a few weeks. Performance tees and some hoodies are common culprits. We'll flag it when we see it.

How embroidery gets priced

Embroidery doesn't count colors — it counts stitches. Your logo has to be digitized first, which means an operator maps out stitch types, directions, densities, and underlay so the machine knows how to sew it. That's a one-time cost per design, and once it's done, the file lives with us. Reorders skip it entirely and match the first run exactly.

After digitizing, price scales with stitch count. A clean left-chest logo is a modest count. A large jacket back, dense fill areas, or fine detail that needs lots of small stitches climbs quickly. If your logo has hairline strokes or tiny text, we'll usually suggest simplifying — see the artwork guidelines for why embroidery needs bolder line weight than screen printing.

Rough ballparks

• Screen-printed tees: often land in the $8–$15 range depending on garment and quantity.
• Embroidered polos: typically $20–$30 with a left-chest logo.
• Caps and hats: usually $12–$22 embroidered.

These are ranges, not quotes. A Gildan tee at 250 pieces and a Comfort Colors or Next Level tee at 24 sit at opposite ends of that first range, and both are correct answers to "how much for a printed shirt."

The costs people forget to budget for

• Size upcharges. Most brands charge more for 2XL and up. If your roster skews large, that shifts your total.
• Individual names and numbers. Personalization is per-piece work, not per-order work. Beautiful on a team roster; not free.
• Rush timing. Compressed schedules can carry a premium depending on what has to move. Read how rush orders actually work before you assume the worst.
• Folding, bagging, and size-run sorting. Individually bagging 300 shirts by name for a company store is real labor.
• Split shipping. One drop-off is simple. Twelve branch locations is twelve shipments.
• Extra locations. A sleeve hit or a printed inside-tag label is a second setup, not a freebie.

How to brief us and get an accurate quote fast

The difference between a same-day number and three rounds of email is usually four details. Send us:

1. Quantity and a size breakdown, even a rough one.
2. The garment, or the vibe — "soft retail tee," "work-ready polo," "something for a summer outdoor event in the heat." We'll suggest blanks from 500+ supplier lines.
3. Your artwork, ideally vector .AI, .EPS, or .PDF with fonts outlined. If all you have is a logo off your website, send it anyway — artwork cleanup, redraw, and re-color are free here.
4. Your in-hand date, and whether it's hard or flexible.

You'll get transparent pricing plus a free digital proof within one business day, and nothing goes on press until you approve it. That's the same ordering process we run for a neighborhood 5K and for the bigger names on our custom apparel work.

Stretching the budget

• Order in fuller quantities. The per-piece curve rewards you fast past 24.
• Keep it to one or two locations. That's where most of the perceived value is anyway.
• Standardize your blanks. Reordering the same garment year over year keeps runs quick and consistent.
• Simplify the art. Dropping from four colors to two on a big run is real savings with no loss of impact.
• Bundle. Shirts, promotional products, and signs and banners ordered together for one event beat three separate scrambles.

Request a free quote with your quantity, garment, and date — or contact us at (502) 265-6446 and we'll build the number with you.