Garment-Dyed Blanks: The Styles, the Specs and the Dye Economics

Most pages about garment-dyed blanks either list styles without explaining the process or explain the process without naming a single style. This one does both: a reference table of the well-known styles with specifications taken from manufacturer and distributor listings, then the sourcing layer — what garment dyeing actually is, why it produces both the hand and the shade variation, and the quantity at which it stops being the cheap way to get colour. It sits under the sourcing economics behind blank apparel pricing; terms are defined in the Yarnstick glossary of sourcing and trade terms.

The well-known garment-dyed blank styles, with published specifications

Garment-dyed blank styles most commonly searched by name, with specifications from manufacturer and distributor listings accessed 16 August 2026. The gsm column converts at 1 oz/yd² = 33.9 g/m².

Four notes on reading that table, because they save real money.

Style number, not brand name. "Comfort Colors garment dyed" spans a tee, a pocket tee, a long sleeve, a tank and two fleece bodies at two different weights. A comfort colors garment dyed t shirt search returns all of them. Buy the number.

Listings disagree on yarn count. The 1717 is quoted at 20 singles by one major distributor, 30 by another and 32 by a third, for the same style. The weight, 6.1 oz, is consistent everywhere. Treat singles on this style as unconfirmed and get it in writing if it matters to you.

Men's and unisex listings are usually the same garment. A comfort colors garment-dyed t-shirt men's listing, a comfort colors garment dyed heavyweight tank top men's listing and their unisex equivalents at the same style number are the same product under a different merchandising heading. There is no separate men's pattern in this programme.

Naming variants are cataloguing habits. The same heavyweight tee appears as 1717, C1717 and CC1717 — the cc1717 heavyweight garment-dyed t-shirt - comfort colors listing and the comfort colors garment dyed heavyweight t shirt 1717 listing point to one garment. Similarly, comfort colors garment dyed heavyweight t shirt and comfort colors garment-dyed heavyweight t-shirt differ only in hyphenation, and the 6014 is catalogued as both the comfort colors adult garment dyed heavyweight long sleeve t-shirt and the comfort colors garment dyed heavyweight long sleeve t shirt. Sellers also write garment dye t shirts and garment dyed t shirts interchangeably; the process behind both is the same.

Related labels sit in the same aesthetic. Authentic Pigment builds its range around pigment-dyed goods, and authentic pigment tee shirts and authentic pigment tees appear alongside Comfort Colors in the same distributor catalogues. Spec-level comparisons across the wider blanks market are in blank apparel brands compared on spec.

What garment dyeing actually is, and why it gives that hand and that colour

Three dye stages exist in apparel, and they differ only in when colour is applied.

The three dyeing stages compared on minimum, consistency and cost.

Garment dye means the garment is cut and sewn in greige or prepared-for-dye fabric and then dyed complete. Two consequences follow directly from that, and they are the reason the category exists.

The hand. A finished garment tumbles in the dye machine for the whole cycle. That mechanical action relaxes the yarn and breaks down fabric stiffness in the same way a garment wash does. The softness is a by-product of the process, not a finish sprayed on afterwards — which is why a garment-dyed tee feels broken-in on the first wear.

The colour. Because body, rib, thread and trims dye together, the piece reads as one tone rather than a body in one shade with topstitching in another. And because each batch is a separate load of finished garments, colour lands slightly differently every time. On pigment-dyed styles the effect is stronger still: pigment is not a dye. It has no chemical affinity for cellulose, so it sits on the fibre surface held by a binder resin, rather than forming the covalent bond that a reactive dye forms with cotton. That is why pigment-dyed goods fade gently with washing — by design, as the aesthetic — and why they crock more when wet. The chemistry is worked through in garment dye against piece dye and yarn dye in technical detail.

Why garment-dyed blanks carry shrinkage and shade tolerances you must accept

This is the part that turns into an argument with a supplier if it was not agreed in advance. Two tolerances are wider on garment-dyed goods, and neither is a defect.

Shrinkage. Garment dyeing typically carries around 3 percent of additional shrinkage tolerance over an equivalent piece-dyed garment. For context, untreated 100 percent ring-spun cotton jersey shrinks 5.0 to 7.5 percent, and the industry norm most brands write is ±3 percent length and width for cotton knits. The major blank programmes get inside that by compacting or pre-shrinking after dyeing, which is why their listings claim minimal shrinkage — the Comfort Colors and ComfortWash pages both make that claim explicitly. On a custom garment-dye run you have to ask for that step. Specify the post-dye finishing and a residual shrinkage target, tested to AATCC TM135 for a North American top-loading machine or ISO 6330 for a European front-loader, and note that results from the two are not interchangeable.

Shade. Standard commercial colour acceptance in apparel is a Delta E of 1.0 to 2.0 against the standard, with the tight end reserved for hero colours. A garment-dye programme will not hold the tight end batch to batch. The correct response is to write the wider tolerance into the specification, agree a shade band with high and low limits rather than a single point, and approve in a light booth under D65 against a current cotton standard. How to write that specification is in how colour tolerance is specified with Delta E.

Two practical rules follow. Buy a whole programme from one batch where you can, because two reorders six months apart will not match. And do not mix batches inside one order going to one customer — a school, a team or an event will notice across a rail what nobody notices on a single garment.

Garment dyed hoodies and sweatshirts: what changes on fleece

A garment dyed hoodie or garment dyed sweatshirt is the same process on a heavier body. The Comfort Colors 1466 crewneck and 1467 hooded sweatshirt are both listed at 6.4 oz/yd² in 100 percent ring-spun US cotton at 31 singles, with the 1467 carrying a jersey-lined hood rather than a fleece-lined one.

Three things change relative to a tee. Colour has to penetrate a much thicker structure, so process time and the risk of uneven take-up both rise. Rib at the collar, cuffs and waistband is a different construction from the body and can take dye at a slightly different rate, which is part of the tonal effect people like and part of the variation they complain about. And fleece amplifies the shrinkage question, because there is more fabric to move. Construction and cost across the fleece category are set out in blank hoodies and sweatshirts, fleece construction and cost.

Carhartt garment dyed product: retail goods, not blanks

A large share of garment-dye searches are actually Carhartt searches, and the honest answer is that these are different markets.

Carhartt garment dyed styles are finished branded retail product. The company's line includes a relaxed-fit midweight garment dye French terry crewneck pocket sweatshirt and a relaxed-fit garment-dyed pocket t-shirt, sold at retail under the Carhartt label. A carhartt garment dyed t shirt, a carhartt garment dyed hoodie, a carhartt men's garment dye crew sweatshirt and a carhartt men's garment dye short sleeve t-shirt are all retail goods — they are not blanks, they do not carry tearaway labels, and you cannot relabel them.

They can be decorated. Carhartt embroidery, custom carhartt hoodies and carhartt custom hoodies are supplied by decorators holding an authorised dealer relationship, subject to brand rules on placement and no relabelling, at a unit cost well above a comparable garment-dyed blank because you are paying for the brand. If you want that aesthetic on something you can put your own label in, the blanks in the table above are the starting point, not a carhartt sweatshirt. Bulk searches for carhartt sweatshirts land in the same place.

A note on how the name is typed. The same product is searched under several spellings and duplications — carhart sweatshirt, carhart sweatshirts, and doubled forms such as carhartt carhartt hoodie — and none of them changes the answer. All of them describe branded retail workwear, not a blank you can relabel, so the sourcing route is the same whichever spelling you arrived on.

One disambiguation worth making: a carhartt wip hoodie is a different line again. Carhartt WIP — Work In Progress — is a separate European-based fashion line with its own fits, fabrics and distribution, and it is not part of the blanks market at all.

And the most-searched Carhartt question in this family is a genuine textile question. Carhartt black hoodie turning brown describes normal behaviour of black cotton, not a fault specific to any one brand: ultraviolet exposure, abrasion and repeated laundering strip colourant unevenly, and black cotton dyed with surface or sulphur systems characteristically shifts toward red-brown as it does. The commercial minimums brands write are a grey-scale rating of 4.0 for laundering and dry crocking and 3.0 for wet crocking, dropping to 2.5 to 3.0 for deep and pigment shades — which tells you that the industry expects deep blacks to move.

Why garment dye is the small-run escape hatch, and where it stops being one

Here is the arithmetic that decides the method. It is not about aesthetics at all; it is about which fixed minimum you have to pay for.

Assumptions, stated so you can re-run them. A 180 gsm single jersey at 1.8 m open width weighs 0.324 kg per linear metre. A tee consumes 0.27 kg of fabric including cutting wastage, which is 0.83 linear metres per tee. Piece dyeing costs €2–5 per metre with a 500 metre minimum per colour; garment dyeing costs €3–7 per garment with a 50 to 200 piece minimum. Both are industry ranges rather than one supplier's quotation.

Dyeing cost per garment by method and run size, in one colour, on the assumptions above.

Read the two right-hand columns against each other. Garment dye per garment is flat. It costs what it costs whether you dye 100 or 10,000, because there is no meaningful fixed minimum to amortise. Piece dye per garment is a hyperbola that falls until the 500 metre minimum is fully used and then goes flat too. On these assumptions the minimum is fully consumed at 602 pieces, and from there piece dye is the cheaper method at every comparable point in the range.

That is the mechanism. The commonly quoted industry figure is that piece dye runs up to 25 percent cheaper above roughly 5,000 pieces, which is directionally the same conclusion arrived at more conservatively — the gap between 600 and 5,000 reflects that garment-dye pricing also falls with volume, that both figures are ranges rather than quotes, and that piece-dyed goods carry lower rework and seconds rates at scale.

The practical rule. Below about 500 pieces per colour, garment dye is not just cheaper, it is frequently the only method available to you — the piece-dye minimum of 500 to 1,000 metres is 250 to 500 garments' worth of cloth you must buy whether you use it or not. That makes garment dye the standard escape hatch for a small colour programme: 50 to 200 pieces per colour, against 500 to 1,000 pieces per colour for a piece-dyed custom knit. The full minimum-order mechanism is in why a minimum order is set by the dye lot.

Two calendar notes to price alongside it. Garment dyeing adds roughly three to five days to the process. And a custom dyed colour adds 4 to 8 weeks to fabric sourcing if you go the piece-dye route, which on a tight launch can matter more than the per-unit difference.

Buying garment-dyed blanks against running your own garment-dye programme

The last decision is whether to buy the blank at all. Garment-dyed blanks sit at the premium end of the wholesale market: at one US distributor on 16 August 2026, garment-dyed heavyweights listed from $8.51 to $13.96, with the Comfort Colors 1717 running about $9.63 at the 250-piece tier and $8.82 above 3,000, and the BELLA+CANVAS 4810GD between roughly $9.54 and $11.36 depending on tier.

Set that against custom production. A 180 gsm cotton tee produced in India at $4.30 FOB has a landed floor of $5.91 per unit at any volume, once freight, 16.5 percent MFN duty, the 10 percent Section 301 forced-labor tariff applying to India as of 16 August 2026, MPF and HMF are counted. Verify the duty lines against the current HTSUS. Against an $8.51 blank the break-even is roughly 1,100 units of one style in one colour; against a $10.00 blank it is about 700. The full break-even table by blank price is on the sourcing economics behind blank apparel pricing.

That makes garment-dyed blanks the clearest crossover case in the whole category. A commodity tee at $2.86 can never be beaten by making it yourself. A garment-dyed heavyweight at $9 or more is beaten at a quantity many brands already buy — and on the other side of that line you choose the weight, the fibre, the fit block and the colour, instead of choosing from a stock card. What to specify when you get there is covered in how to read a blank tee spec.

Garment-dyed wovens: oxford shirts, shorts and why there are fewer of them

Garment dyeing is overwhelmingly a knits category, but it exists in wovens. A garment dyed oxford shirt is a woven cotton oxford dyed after making up, which gives the softened hand and slightly chalky, uneven colour associated with washed shirting. Garment dyed gabardine shorts are the same idea on a tightly woven twill.

Two reasons the woven side of garment dyed clothing is thinner. Wovens are harder to dye evenly once made up, because seams, interlinings and multiple fabric layers take colour at different rates, so the risk of a rejected batch is higher. And woven garments carry more components — interlining, fusible, buttons, thread — each of which has to survive the dye bath. The result is that most garment-dyed wovens are branded retail product rather than blanks, and a custom garment-dyed woven programme carries a higher minimum and a longer development cycle than the knit equivalent.

Frequently asked questions