Online Clothing: What Your Money Actually Buys

A €15 t-shirt and a €45 t-shirt are not the same object at different margins. Some of the gap is real and some of it is not, and the difference is learnable in about five minutes.

The cotton

Weight is the first honest signal. Cotton is sold by weight, so a heavier shirt genuinely costs more to make.

A 240gsm shirt uses roughly half again as much cotton as a 160gsm one. That part of the price is not a story.

How the cotton was spun matters nearly as much. *Carded* cotton keeps the short fibres, which is why cheap shirts feel slightly fuzzy and pill. *Combed* and *ring-spun* cotton has them removed — smoother surface, stronger yarn, less pilling. It costs more because it wastes more.

The construction

Four details separate a garment that keeps its shape from one that does not, and all four are visible.

• Side-seamed rather than tubular. Tubular is cheaper to make and twists in the wash; a side-seamed body keeps its line.
• Shoulder-to-shoulder taping. A strip of fabric across the back of the shoulders that stops the neckline sagging.
• Double-needle stitching at hem and cuffs. Two rows, so one failing does not open the seam.
• Ribbed collar with elastane. A plain jersey collar goes wavy after a few wears and never recovers.

Shops that do these things tend to list them, because they cost money. Shops that do not, say "premium quality".

The printing

Covered properly elsewhere, but for price: direct-to-garment has no setup cost and a real per-unit cost, so small runs and complex artwork are viable. Screen printing costs a lot to set up and almost nothing per shirt, so it is cheap only at volume. Embroidery is priced by stitch count.

A cheap shirt with a big full-colour print is usually a cheap shirt with a print that will crack.

The part that is not the garment

Here is where the €15 and the €45 shirt genuinely diverge, and it is not always in the buyer's favour either way.

Stock risk. A brand manufacturing on a forecast has to guess how many mediums it will sell. It guesses wrong, and the unsold stock is discounted, warehoused or destroyed. That waste is in the price of everything that did sell.

Made-to-order removes the guess and the waste, and charges a higher per-unit cost instead — nothing is printed until someone buys it. You pay more per shirt and nothing for the warehouse.

Retail markup. A shirt passing through a distributor and a shop picks up a margin at each step. Direct-to-consumer removes the steps; whether it removes them from the price is a decision, not a law.

Marketing. On some clothing this is the largest single line. It is not visible in the garment at all.

What it is not

A higher price is not evidence of better cotton. Plenty of expensive clothing is a 150gsm blank with a licence fee on top. The gsm, the spin and the construction are checkable; the price is not evidence of any of them.

An organic or recycled label is a real cost, but it is a claim about how the cotton was grown, not how heavy or well-made the garment is. A lightweight organic tee is still lightweight.

The five-minute test

Before buying online, find these. If a shop publishes all five, it is confident in the answers:

1. gsm
2. Combed / ring-spun, or not
3. Side-seamed, or not
4. The actual blank — manufacturer and model
5. Flat measurements in centimetres

The last one is worth most on the day it arrives. The first four tell you whether the price makes sense at all.

Everything here is 240gsm combed cotton or heavier, printed to order, with the blank named and its measurements published on the product page. Shop the collection.