Resources & Information
Why Custom Apparel?
If you are new to custom apparel, it is pretty cool! You can easily place any design onto the apparel of your choice, providing countless uses for individuals and groups, including:
- Unique and personalized gifts
- Family reunions and birthday parties
- Baby showers and bachelor/bachelorette parties
- Charities, churches, and fundraising events
- Festivals, conferences, and concerts
- Awareness campaigns and political candidacies
- Business promotions and team building.
Why not get started putting your ideas to work today?!
We Are Here to Help!
Whether your project is big or small, our site is designed to provide you with support throughout your journey. But maybe you aren’t quite sure where to start or you don’t know what information you even need. Whatever the case, we are here! Complete our Project Form or call us to get started.
Improving the World - One T-shirt at a time
Naturally, we love creating custom apparel but we really love creating custom apparel for a worthy cause. If you are part of a community that invests its time, energy, and passion to make the world a little bit better, we are keen to help.
Custom apparel is a great way to increase awareness about your cause, inspire and grow your community, and raise funds to support your efforts. We will provide your non-profit organization with its own site delivering its own words, images and messaging to reach its audience. Choose hundreds and hundreds of product options to showcase your designs. And we are there with you from end-to-end 1) assisting with the creation of your imagery, 2) providing recommendations for product selection and pricing, 3) offering basic support for engagement campaigns, and 4) fulfilling orders for your community! There is no charge for website construction and consulting services for up to 10 products (the majority of our non-profit partners have less than 10 products, so it’s almost always free!). On top of that, our apparel cost to you is, on average, 25% lower than our standard single-item pricing.
Please complete our Fundraising Form or call us and we can get started serving your community.
Promoting Your Company
Staying connected to your customers and keeping your staff engaged are full-time jobs of their own. Use custom apparel to help your brand, internally and externally. Whether you are hosting an important event for your customers or kicking off a critical internal initiative, custom apparel is going to help you remain top of mind and build team spirit. We can also provide a branded store with your words and images. Please call or email us to discuss your needs and how we can support them.
Shipping & Expedited Processing
Although most customers choose standard shipping, we offer different options from major carriers that are available at checkout. Shipping is not a profit center for us. We charge you the same rates we pay plus we include a $1.50 handling fee to cover materials and packing. These costs along with an expected delivery timeframe will be transparently provided at checkout.
However, sometimes standard approaches don’t work. Sometimes you need your customized apparel fast – really fast. We call these situations t-shirt emergencies and they do happen! If you are experiencing such an emergency, we may be able to help. Please complete our Rush Order Form or call us and we will move mountains to get your apparel to you, your way, by your desired date. We have a simple pricing model for expedited processing – $25 flat fee plus $1.50 per/item.
Embroidery
If you are looking for embroidery you have come to the right place. We do a lot of embroidery! In our experience, online tools haven’t evolved sufficiently to ensure a consistently high quality experience for our embroidery customers so we add some good old-fashioned human interaction to ensure that things go right. Please submit our Embroidery Form to get things moving or, if you prefer, give us a call.
Our Pricing Philosophy
We believe that custom apparel should be available to everyone! And that means affordability is really important to us. Our business model allows us to provide the very best pricing. We don’t have corporate overhead and we don’t have detached stockholders demanding greater profits.
By all means shop around. If you find a better price, just email us a valid quote from an American supplier that is less than 30 days old and let us beat it!
Request a Quote
Maybe you know exactly what you need or you have a formal purchasing process that must be followed. We would be happy to provide you with a formal quote. Please submit our Quote Form and we will respond quickly. As always, feel free to call us.
Image & Design Troubleshooting
Probably the trickiest thing about custom apparel is making sure that you have the perfect design. This challenge has two primary aspects to it – graphical appeal and technical considerations. Let’s explore each of these.
Graphical Appeal
Graphical appeal is pretty simple. Does your design look the way you want it to? Does it capture your initial inspiration? If you have the perfect design, then great! If not, we can help in several ways:
1) Many of our customers find a design they like from one of the readymade templates that we offer. If this appeals to you, explore our templates (button below) to see what offer out of the box.
2) Maybe you have a firm design idea that you like but it needs work. A common example is when you have a photo which contains the design you want but you don’t have a good way to create your specific design from the photo. We offer additional Design Assistance in these instances for $35/hour with a one-hour minimum. In most cases, customers pay less than $50 for their finished design and have it completed within 3 business days. Get started now by completing our Design-Image Help Form.
3) Sometimes, however, we have a bunch of design ideas swirling in our head but nothing which is firm and no real starting point. In this case, you probably need to consult a graphic artist. If you don’t already have a graphic artist we would recommend you check out Venus 9 Design. They provide high quality and affordable graphic design services.
Technical Considerations
Technical considerations are, well, they’re technical. The information below while certainly not comprehensive does cover the most common challenges people encounter. If this isn’t getting you where you need to go, then please call us or reach out through our Design-Image Help Form (buttons below).
As a starting point, technical challenges usually come down to two related things: 1) image quality and size and 2) configuring an image. But before we bore you with a bunch of technical jargon, let’s start with a basic idea. If you can upload your image files with our design tools and place those images onto your apparel choices in a way that looks good to you, then continue on with your shopping journey. Rest assured, we review all of the images uploaded as part of your order and we often implement small corrections to improve the quality of the final product. In exceptional circumstances, your images could require significant work and if that’s the case we will reach out to you.
Now, a few details about image files. The first important detail is size. Really large files can be make life difficult as working them is often slow and labor intensive for you AND our tools limit the maximum size of an individual image you upload to 25MB. Next, our tools accept most common image file types like svg, ai, eps, pdf, gif, jpg, png, and tiff. If you have options, then it is best to provide svg, ai, or eps file types. If you can’t provide one of these preferred file types, that is absolutely okay. Upload whatever file type you have and you will end up in the exact same place – with great looking custom apparel that you’ll love!
But, you may ask, “what if I can’t get my images placed on my apparel in a way that looks good to me?”. If this happens then please reach out to us through our Design-Image Help Form. Below are the four most common challenges people encounter and we can address all of them:
- “When I make my design bigger, the resolution is poor or the image is blurry.”
- “I want to change some of the colors within my design but I don’t have the ability to do it.”
- “My image has a white background. I want the background to be transparent.”
- “I can’t place my designs in the desired locations.”
Legal Stuff
Keep in mind that by uploading artwork you represent that you have full legal rights to use the images you provide.
T-shirt Materials
While choosing a great design is important to create your perfect t-shirt, it is also important to know some of the differences in t-shirt materials.
T-shirts fall into three broad categories: cotton, CVC or 50/50 blends (cotton/polyester), and tri-blends (50% cotton, 25% polyester, 25% rayon).
Before we compare these materials let’s begin by saying that they are all going to be soft. Whew!!!
Cotton t-shirts are going to be sturdier, less prone to wrinkling, more colorfast, and better for sensitive skin. On the other end of the spectrum, tri-blends are going to be lighter, quicker drying, more form fitting, and less susceptible to shrinking. Poly/cotton blends, being the Goldilocks of the group, fall somewhere between cotton and tri-blends.
