I have a 12-color front design and a million-color back design for a T-shirt. I need to find the cheapest possible website to buy 18 of these shirts from (digital printed, of course).
I already found the following estimates:
Bolt Printing ($333)
Custom Ink ($500)
Rush Order Tees ($700)
Underground Printing ($1000 – their dumb algorithm thought I wanted screen printing, and there was no option to change to digital printing)
Surely there must be a cheaper website? Do any of you have shirts with tons of colors on them? If so, I would like to know where you bought them.
And please don’t tell me to reduce the colors and go with screen printing. That is a last resort, but I’d rather do digital printing with millions of colors.
In my experience working with ordering our team’s shirts this year which have about 8-9 colors on the front and 1 on the back is that a) ordering more shirts is your best friend when trying to get a lower price/shirt, even ordering another shirt or two can lower the price/shirt and b) depending on which shirt you are using as your base ie a 50/50 blended shirt vs. a tri-blend will also make a difference.
Since y’all are only ordering 18 of your shirts (which if I may ask, what do they look like since your using an insane number of colors), I’d inquire locally at local screen printers- in our area we have BigFrog but a simple google search of "custom tshirt " should give you some local businesses to call and e-mail around. I will say though, while local is nice, typically online vendors, at the number of colors you have going right now, will most likely be giving you a lower price/ shirt.
May I ask why full-color sponsor logos are necessary? I’ve included how our team silhouettes our sponsors and in my personal opinion, makes for an overall cleaner back t-shirt design vs if we were to use the full-color version of all our sponsors.
I would edit your front design to have the greys of the horns and the “head outline” to be the same grey (or metallic grey), have the two different blues, and the purple “eye” and print it on a black shirt to get a four color screen print. If you wanted to print it on a blue shirt I would use the lighter blue color as the shirt color and then screen print the dark blue, grey, black, and purple. Put the text on the front in grey circling your logo in either case.
As for the sponsor logos on the back, I would print them as a single screen using either a black, white, or silver print; dependent on the shirt color. I would rearrange the logos also and include the written name of your major sponsor in addition to their logo. I would suggest possibly even to do a four color back using only text for the sponsors names in the colors of gold, silver, bronze, and black, with decreasing size from largest to smallest sponsorship. The differing shape of Chinburg and the tricolor logo for Lenk makes the current design a bit disconnected.
I would then look for a local screen printing shop and see if they would work a price for your shirts, possibly even highly discounted by including their name/logo. Also round up your shirt count to the next quantity price break, it is always nice to give the sponsors a couple shirts each.
https://www.uberprints.com/studio
I got about $15 each using digital printing (not screen printing) and a full-color front and back, for 18 shirts. I used Uberprints 2 years ago for team shirts for a school project group, and I still wear the shirt occasionally today. More than good enough quality for team shirts, I would think.
We’ve worked with Bolt Printing for about 8 years now. Their customer service, pricing, and turn around time is fantastic. I would highly recommend them.
I just stuck a picture on the front and back then hit “calculate”. Then I plugged in a distribution of L, M, and S shirts. Make sure you select digital printing.
I just paid $900 to a fine, hardworking local screen printer for 100 high quality shirts with two colors on the front and one on the back. Colors are overrated
