Minimum order quantities are not printers being awkward. Where they come from, how to think about them, and what to do when your order is under the line.
In this article · 3 sections
Ask a screen printer for six shirts and you will usually get a polite no, or a price that makes your eyes water. That is not awkwardness. It is arithmetic, and once you see it, minimum quantities make complete sense.
Where the minimum comes from
Every colour in a screen-printed design needs its own screen: coated, exposed, washed out, registered on the press and cleaned afterwards. That is real labour and materials before a single garment is printed, and it costs the same whether the run is six shirts or six hundred. Spread over six hundred, the setup disappears into pennies. Spread over six, it can double or triple the price of each shirt.
So a minimum order quantity is really the printer saying: below this number, the setup swamps the job and neither of us will be happy with the price. More colours mean more screens, which is why a six-colour design carries a higher minimum than a one-colour logo.
Typical shapes of the deal
Every shop sets its own rules, but the pattern is consistent: a floor somewhere between twenty and fifty units for simple designs, price breaks at fifty, one hundred and two hundred and fifty, and surcharges for extra colours, extra print positions and dark garments that need an underbase layer. If a quote seems high, it is nearly always the colour count rather than the garment.
What to do below the minimum
Digital printing exists precisely for this gap. DTG and DTF have no screens and therefore no setup worth mentioning, which means no minimum at all: one hoodie is a perfectly good order. The prints are made differently and feel slightly different, and we have covered how the methods compare if you want the detail.
The pragmatic playbook used by a lot of small brands: launch every design digitally with no stock and no minimums, watch what actually sells, and only then consider a screen print run for the one or two designs with proven, committed demand. You get digital's zero risk while you learn, and bulk pricing only where it is genuinely earned.
Every garment in the allthe catalogue is made to order with a minimum of exactly one, so testing a design costs you the price of a single garment rather than a print run.