Quantity changes the right answer more than any other factor. What we would genuinely recommend at each order size, including when not to use us.
In this article · 5 sections
People agonise over print methods, but most of the time the quantity has already made the decision. Setup cost is the whole economics of garment printing: methods with expensive setup get cheap at volume, methods with no setup cost the same at any volume. Here is what that means at four order sizes.
One garment
Digital print, no contest. DTG for cotton and detail, DTF for bold colour, synthetic fabrics, caps and bags. There is no setup, so a single garment is economically sensible, which is what makes one-off gifts and personalised products viable as a business at all.
Ten garments
Still digital. Ten is nowhere near enough to pay off screens, and this is the classic size for a stag do, a small team, a market-stall test run or a first drop. One practical tip at this size: if all ten are the same design, ask whether they are really the same garment. Mixed sizes and a colour or two cost nothing extra with digital print, so offer the choice.
Fifty garments
This is the honest crossover zone. A simple one or two colour design at fifty units starts to make screen printing quotes look reasonable, and if you are confident every unit will be worn, a local screen printer deserves a call. But fifty is also exactly where stock risk starts to bite: fifty shirts in a size split you guessed is how cupboards fill up. If the fifty will sell gradually rather than all at once, made to order still wins even at a higher per-unit cost, because unsold stock is the most expensive kind.
Five hundred garments
If it is genuinely one design, few colours, and the whole run is committed, screen printing wins on price and we will say so plainly. Where five hundred gets interesting is when it is secretly fifty designs selling ten each, or one design that sells steadily across a year. Then you are not looking at a bulk job at all: you are looking at a catalogue, and made to order handles catalogues better than any stockroom.
The rule of thumb
Setup-free methods for uncertainty, setup-heavy methods for certainty. The more sure you are that every single unit will be worn, the more a screen print run rewards you. The less sure you are, the more the maths favours printing only what has already sold.
That trade-off between risk and unit price is the entire print on demand argument, and we have written up the honest version of it here, including the cases where we would point you at a bulk printer instead.