More sign and print shops are selling apparel than used to. Sometimes it is a deliberate line of business; more often a good customer asks for shirts, and saying no means sending them to someone who will also happily quote their next banner. Either way, the quote tends to get built the same way: look up the blank, add something for the print, multiply by the quantity.
That produces a number quickly. It also hides the single fact that decides whether apparel makes or loses money: a large share of the cost does not depend on how many shirts you print.
The short version. Price each blank by size, because sizes do not cost the same. Keep setup separate from run cost, because setup is fixed per order and run cost is per piece. Then let the per-shirt price at each quantity fall out of the arithmetic. Price breaks are not a discount you choose — they are setup being spread over more shirts.
What follows is one worked order. Every figure in it is an illustrative placeholder — a stand-in so the arithmetic is visible, not a market price, a supplier price or your cost. Substitute your own inputs; the structure holds.
The example order: 48 shirts, two-color front print
A customer wants 48 shirts with a two-color design on the front. Screen printed in-house on a manual press. The size run looks like most real orders: mostly mid-sizes, with a few larger ones at the end.
Step one: price the blank by size
Blank cost usually steps up at the larger sizes. The fast quote ignores that and uses one blank price for everything. Here is what that costs:
| Sizes | Pieces | Blank cost each | Blank cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| S – XL | 40 | $3.50 | $140.00 |
| 2XL | 6 | $5.25 | $31.50 |
| 3XL | 2 | $6.40 | $12.80 |
| Total | 48 | — | $184.30 |
Quote all 48 at the $3.50 blank and you recover $168.00 of a $184.30 cost. The 2XL and 3XL shirts are only 16.7% of the pieces, but ignoring them under-recovers blank cost by 8.8% — $16.30 on this order.
Whether you show the customer a per-size upcharge or fold it into one blended price is a presentation choice. The cost underneath should be built by size either way.
Step two: separate setup from run cost
This is the part that matters most. Some of the work happens once per order regardless of quantity; the rest happens once per shirt.
Setup — fixed per order
Illustrative hours for a two-color job:
| Setup task | Hours |
|---|---|
| Art separation and film | 0.75 |
| Coat, burn and tape screens (2 × 0.30) | 0.60 |
| Press setup and registration | 0.40 |
| Cleanup and screen reclaim (2 × 0.25) | 0.50 |
| Total setup | 2.25 |
At an illustrative press work-center rate of $65.00 an hour, that is $146.25 of setup — the same $146.25 whether the order is 12 shirts or 144. (The rate is deliberately different from the $86.26 in our shop hourly rate post: different work centers carry different costs and should be priced separately.)
Run cost — per shirt
Illustratively, the press produces 50 two-color prints an hour, and folding, bagging and counting runs at 120 shirts an hour. Ink is $0.12 a print. For 48 shirts that is 1.36 hours — $88.40 of labour — plus $5.76 of ink.
| Component | Basis | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Blanks | by size, above | $184.30 |
| Setup | 2.25 hr × $65.00 | $146.25 |
| Print, fold, bag | 1.36 hr × $65.00 | $88.40 |
| Ink | 48 × $0.12 | $5.76 |
| Total cost, 48 shirts | — | $424.71 |
That is $8.85 a shirt, of which $3.05 is setup. Hold on to that $3.05 — it is the number that moves.
Step three: let the price breaks fall out
Now run the same job at different quantities, keeping the same size mix (an average blank of about $3.84) and the same setup. The price column applies an illustrative 40% gross margin.
| Qty | Total cost | Cost / shirt | Setup / shirt | Setup share | Price / shirt |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 12 | $215.86 | $17.99 | $12.19 | 67.8% | $29.98 |
| 24 | $285.48 | $11.90 | $6.09 | 51.2% | $19.83 |
| 48 | $424.71 | $8.85 | $3.05 | 34.4% | $14.75 |
| 72 | $563.94 | $7.83 | $2.03 | 25.9% | $13.05 |
| 144 | $981.63 | $6.82 | $1.02 | 14.9% | $11.36 |
Setup is 67.8% of the cost of a 12-piece order and 14.9% of a 144-piece order. Cost per shirt at 12 is 2.64 times cost per shirt at 144, with nothing about the shirt or the print changing.
This is where the flat per-shirt price goes wrong. Say the shop settles on $14.75 a shirt because it works at 48. A 12-piece order at that price brings in $177.00 against a cost of $215.86 — a $38.86 loss before anyone has made a mistake. And small orders are exactly the ones a print shop's existing customers tend to ask for.
Two more inputs move this table, and both belong in the setup line rather than the per-shirt line:
- Number of colors. Every additional color adds a screen to burn, register and reclaim. Setup scales with colors, not with shirts.
- Number of print locations. A front and a back print is two setups, not one setup with more ink.
If you outsource the decoration
Many hybrid shops do not run a press at all — they buy blanks, send them to a contract decorator, and deliver the finished order. The structure is the same; the setup line just appears on someone else's invoice. What changes is the lines that do not appear on anyone's invoice.
| Outsourced decoration, 48 shirts | Basis | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Contractor screen setup | 2 colors × $25.00 | $50.00 |
| Contractor print charge | 48 × $1.90 | $91.20 |
| Freight, both directions | 2 × $18.00 | $36.00 |
| Receive, count, check, re-bag | 0.75 hr × $65.00 | $48.75 |
| Total decoration cost | — | $225.95 |
Freight and handling are $84.75 of that — 37.5% of the decoration cost — and they are the two lines most often left off an outsourced apparel quote, because the contractor's invoice looks like the whole cost. It is not.
On these illustrative numbers the outsourced route comes in at $225.95 against $240.41 to decorate in-house. Do not read anything into that gap: with different colors, quantities, freight or press rates it reverses easily. The point is to run both with your real figures rather than assume one is always cheaper.
The inputs worth settling once
- Blank cost by size, from your supplier's current pricing — not a remembered average.
- Setup hours per color and per location, from timed jobs rather than estimates.
- Your press or decoration work-center rate, separate from your wide-format or install rate.
- Run speed and finishing speed, which together set the per-shirt labour.
- For outsourced work: freight both ways and your own handling time, as standing line items.
- Your margin, stated as margin. A 40% margin is a 66.7% markup on cost; the difference between those two words is covered in our post on pricing wide format printing.
What to do with this on Monday
Pull the last five apparel orders you quoted. For each one, rebuild the cost with blanks by size and setup as its own line, and compare it to what you charged. Pay particular attention to the smallest orders — that is where a flat per-shirt price does its damage, and it is where most print-shop apparel business starts.
If you are building this in a spreadsheet, read the trade-offs of quoting from a spreadsheet before adding another tab. And if you would rather apparel sat on the same quote as the banners and the signs, priced from what your jobs actually cost, that is what our AI print estimator is built around.