“How come I can’t order just one shirt?”
I get this question a lot. And I can understand why! So many things in our lives are super easy to do. If you want something from Amazon, you just click “order now” and it arrives at your place in a day.
Screen printing isn’t like that. It isn’t something that I can just click and do. Screen printing is a very manually intensive printing process with lots of time involved.
For me to print you one shirt requires about 4 hours. My shop rate runs about $100 an hour, so that single shirt would cost you about $400 of my time. It really would be crazy to spend time building a $400 one shirt quote. They never seem to result in me getting the screen printing job, so maintaining a 24 piece minimum sort of stops the one shirt request before it starts.
Another reason for a 24 shirt minimum is that at 24 shirts the per piece price becomes reasonable for the customer and I start to make a profit.
“How come the per piece price goes down when I order more?”
Remember that shop rate? Prices reflect a combination of garment prices and printing time.
It looks like this: Shop time + blank Garment Price + ink and screens = Finished shirt price.
My minimum shop time for a job is 2 hours. It take an hour to burn screens, setup the press, and get everything hot and tested and ready. I can print about 200 shirts an hour on my auto press on a one color job. So the $200 shop rate is divided by 200 shirts and works out to about $1.00 per shirt. If I am printing 24 shirts, the $200 hour is divided by 24 shirts and works out to about $8.33 per shirt.
If you really need just one shirt, I recommend finding a “direct to garment” printer.