How to Order Custom Shirts in Bulk Online Without Getting Burned

Ordering forty shirts online is not ordering one shirt forty times. Different questions, different failure modes, and the expensive ones all happen before anything is printed.

Decide the print method before the quantity

This is the decision that sets your price, and most people make it by accident.

Direct-to-garment has no setup cost. A run of twenty costs twenty times a unit, and full-colour artwork costs the same as one colour. It is the right answer for small runs, photographic designs, and any order with mixed sizes and colours.

Screen printing charges per colour per screen, then almost nothing per unit. Two hundred shirts of one design in one or two colours is where it wins, and it wins decisively. Below roughly fifty units the setup swamps the saving.

Embroidery is priced by stitch count, not by colour. It is the right answer for caps, polos and left-chest logos, and the wrong one for anything with fine detail — below about 4mm, letters fill in and become unreadable.

A supplier who quotes without asking which of the three you need is quoting a guess. The full comparison is here.

Send artwork that can actually be printed

The most common delay in a bulk order is artwork, and it is almost always resolution.

• Vector — SVG, AI, EPS — is ideal. It scales to any size with no loss.
• PNG with a transparent background is fine at 2000px or more on the longest edge for a chest print.
• A logo pulled off a website is usually 300px wide and will look soft at A4 on a chest. It is the single most common problem.
• A JPEG of a logo carries a white box around it unless someone removes it by hand.

If you only have the weak version, send it anyway and ask directly: *will this hold at print size?* A supplier who says yes to everything is not doing you a favour.

Get the sizes right before you order, not after

A bulk order is where sizing mistakes multiply. Two rules save most of it.

Collect sizes from people, do not estimate them. A spreadsheet with names against sizes takes an afternoon and prevents a reorder.

Publish the garment's real measurements when you collect. Not "Large" — the actual chest and length in centimetres for the blank being printed. People size very differently across EU, UK, US and Nigerian labels, and a team ordering across countries will get it wrong otherwise.

Order a handful spare in the middle sizes. Someone always joins late.

Ask these five questions

1. Which exact blank is it? Not "a premium tee" — a manufacturer and a model number, so you can look up its weight and measurements yourself.
2. What is the total, delivered, including tax? A per-unit price with shipping and duty added later is not a quote.
3. When will it arrive, and what is the cutoff for that date? Production time and shipping time are separate numbers. Ask for both.
4. Will I see a proof? A mockup of your artwork on the actual garment, before production. If the answer is no, keep looking.
5. What happens if it comes out wrong? Misprints happen. What matters is who pays and how fast the replacement moves.

On minimums

Print-on-demand has largely removed the minimum order quantity, and that changes the calculation. You no longer have to order a hundred to get a sensible unit price on a small run, and you are not stuck with forty unsold shirts in size S.

What you give up is the steep discount that comes with volume screen printing. If you genuinely need five hundred of one design in one colour, a screen-printing house will beat any made-to-order supplier and should.

Anywhere below that, made to order is usually both cheaper in total and less risky, because the waste is zero.

Timing

Work backwards from the date you need them, and add a week you do not need.

`` artwork approved → proof → production → shipping → the date 1 day 1 day 2–5 days 2–5 days buffer ``

Two weeks is comfortable for most European deliveries. One week is possible. Three days is how mistakes get made.

We quote bulk runs by return — artwork, quantity, sizes and delivery country is enough to start. Bulk and custom orders has the detail.