Apparel Decoration Methods Compared: Screen Print, Embroidery, DTG, DTF and Sublimation

Every decoration argument is really an argument about where fixed cost sits. Screen printing front-loads it into screens; embroidery front-loads it into digitising and then charges by the stitch; DTG and DTF have almost no fixed cost and almost no volume discount. This page sits under how custom and decorated apparel is actually sourced, and the garment side is in how to read a blank tee spec. All decorator prices below are US market figures as of 16 August 2026.

The six decoration methods, compared on setup, per-unit cost and minimum

Decoration methods compared. Setup and per-unit figures are US decorator ranges as of 16 August 2026; per-unit excludes the garment.

Two rows carry most of the decisions. Sublimation's fabric row is a hard constraint, not a preference. And embroidery's per-unit basis — per thousand stitches, not per garment — is the reason a small logo is cheap and a full back is not.

Screen printing: setup per colour per screen, and why it dominates above 50 pieces

A screen print pushes ink through a mesh stencil, one screen per colour, onto the garment, then cures it. Everything about the economics follows from "one screen per colour": each colour needs its own screen burned, its own film positive and its own registration on the press, and US decorators charge $15 to $30 per colour for that, typically $25.

Once the screens exist, the marginal cost of a shirt is ink and press time, and it collapses with volume. Published 2026 tiers at one US decorator run $3.50 per colour per shirt at 12–23 pieces, $2.25 at 48–99, $1.25 at 200–499, and $0.65 at 1,000 and above. Most shops will not take a clothing screen print job below 24 to 72 pieces per design, because setup time swamps the run.

Plastisol, water-based, discharge and puff inks

• Plastisol. PVC-based, sits on and in the fabric, cures around 320°F. Works on light and dark, cotton and blends. Detectable hand, and it cracks if mis-cured. The default, included in base pricing.
• Water-based. Absorbs into the fibres, so the print is nearly imperceptible to the hand. Poor opacity on darks, dries in the screen during production, adds roughly $0.50–$1.00 per colour per piece.
• Discharge. A chemical agent removes the garment's own dye and deposits pigment in its place, so there is no ink film at all — the softest possible screen print. Requires reactive-dyed cotton, will not work on polyester or on white, and the shade varies by garment brand and dye chemistry. Also $0.50–$1.00 per colour per piece.
• Puff. Plastisol with a foaming agent that expands under heat. Adds $1.25–$2.00 per location and destroys fine detail, so it belongs on bold shapes and thick type.

Contract screen printing and what it means for a brand

Contract screen printing is production-only: you supply the garments and the separations, and the printer charges for setup and press time without selling you blanks. Brands use it when they already buy their own blanks; decorators use it to buy capacity or a technique they do not run in house. The trade-off is risk — spoilage on garments you bought is your loss, so agree a spoilage allowance in writing first. The screen printing supplies side of the business — mesh, emulsion, film, squeegees, inks — is a real consumables and capital cost, which is why setup is billed separately from the shirts.

Embroidery is priced per thousand stitches, not per garment

Embroidery has two costs and neither is per garment. First, digitising: converting artwork into a stitch file with defined stitch types, directions, densities and underlay. That runs $40–$100 for a standard logo, $80–$150 for a complex one, and $100–$250 for a full back, and it is paid once and reused forever. Second, run cost, at $0.50–$1.50 per thousand stitches, falling with quantity — roughly $1.20–$1.50 at single pieces, $0.70–$0.95 at 50–99, and $0.50–$0.65 at 500 and above.

Typical stitch counts and what they cost to run.

That table is the whole argument. A chest mark is cheap; a large logo is not, at any volume, because thread and machine time scale linearly with area. Embroidery never gets the collapse in unit cost that screen printing gets.

Where embroidery fails. Melco's published design guidelines set the practical floors: minimum 0.25 inch for lowercase lettering and 0.3 inch for uppercase, minimum stroke width 1 mm, smallest single stitch about 2 mm, and a recommended ceiling of six colours against a machine maximum of sixteen. Anything below those thresholds is enlarged or dropped in digitising. That is why fine line work, small serif type and photographic gradients cannot be embroidered — not "look worse," cannot. The second failure mode is fabric: lightweight and stretchy knits distort under the needle and pucker, and the fixes are cut-away backing, lower density, adequate underlay and hooping without stretch.

Best polo shirts for embroidery, and why piqué is the safe base

Piqué is a knit-and-tuck structure that curls and stretches far less than single jersey, so it holds a logo's registration. The best polo shirts for embroidery are 200–240 gsm cotton piqué with a firm hand and a stable placket. Performance polyester piqué at 160–200 gsm works but moves more, so a custom embroidered polyester polo shirt needs a sew-out on the actual garment before bulk approval, and mesh needs one round more. Custom embroidered golf apparel is nearly always performance piqué for this reason.

Decorators list this work under several names that mean one job: custom embroidery polo shirts, custom embroidered polos, custom polo embroidery, custom embroidered polo shirts and custom embroidered collared shirts all describe a logo stitched onto a stock collared blank, and so does custom embroidered corporate apparel. Programme mechanics are in corporate polo and uniform programmes.

Custom embroidered hoodies and sweatshirts on napped fleece

Brushed fleece is the hardest common substrate: the nap is raised fibre, so stitches sink into it and the design loses definition. Custom sweatshirt embroidery on a napped face needs heavier underlay and often a water-soluble topping, both of which raise the stitch count and the price. Custom embroidered sweatshirts and custom embroidered hoodies work best on stable 320 gsm or heavier fleece with cut-away backing; a custom embroidered sweatshirt in lightweight French terry is the classic puckering job. A custom embroidered hoodie with a chest mark is a good product; the same garment with a 20,000-stitch back is an expensive one. Custom embroidered jumpers — jumper being British English for a pullover — follow the same rules.

DTG, DTF and heat transfers: no setup, no volume discount

DTG (direct-to-garment) inkjets water-based pigment straight onto the garment after a pretreatment spray. No screens, no setup, no minimum, full photographic colour. Published 2026 pricing runs $15 a shirt at 1–30 pieces on light garments, $8 at 51–100, and $5 at 251 and above; dark garments run $20, $10 and $6.50 at the same tiers because they need a white underbase. Cotton gives the best result, 50/50 and tri-blends are acceptable, and high-polyester athletic fabric is a poor fit — the ink has nothing to bind to and dye migration discolours it.

DTF (direct-to-film) prints the same CMYK plus white onto a release film, dusts it with adhesive powder, cures it, and heat-presses it later. Its advantage over DTG is fabric range: it works on cotton, blends, polyester and nylon, because the adhesive does the bonding rather than the fibre. Ready-made transfer pricing runs from about $2.00 for a 2-inch design at single quantities down to $0.70 at 250+, and an 11-inch design from $10.00 down to $3.50. No setup, no minimum. The cost is a visible film edge and a hand you can feel.

Custom screen print transfers, vinyl and the stock-and-press model

Custom screen print transfers are plastisol screen-printed onto release paper instead of a garment. You pay screen setup once, run the print, and store it, then press it onto whatever garment and size actually sells. That converts an inventory decision into a deferred one, which is why event, team and uniform programmes use it. Heat transfer vinyl is a different thing — solid coloured film plotted, weeded and pressed, one layer per colour, ideal for names and numbers and hopeless for anything complex.

Sublimation puts the dye inside the fibre, and only works on polyester

Sublimation heats solid dye until it becomes a gas, which enters polyester polymer and solidifies inside it. The result has no hand at all and cannot crack, peel or wash off. It also enables genuine all-over prints, since fabric can be printed as yardage before cutting.

The constraint is absolute. SanMar's decorator guidance sets the threshold at 65% polyester — below that the dye has nothing to bond to in the cotton, and the image washes out to a dull, blurred ghost. Recycled polyester is more prone to dye migration and shade shift and tolerates less heat; elastane blends distort the image as the fabric relaxes.

Woven labels, patches and appliqué: branding that is not a print

Woven labels — main, size and care labels, plus external branding tabs — are woven on a narrow-fabric loom and sewn in during assembly, so they are a manufacturing decision with their own MOQ and lead time, not a decorator job, and their content is regulated by the FTC's Textile Fiber Products Identification Act rules. Embroidered and woven patches are made off-garment and attached, which is how you get dense, high-stitch-count artwork without stitching it into a lightweight body. Appliqué cuts a fabric shape, lays it on the garment and stitches the edge, covering large areas in a fraction of the stitches full embroidery would need — the standard route for large collegiate lettering.

The crossover arithmetic: what the same tee costs at 12, 50, 200, 1,000 and 5,000 pieces

This is the question behind almost every search in this category. Below, decoration cost is added to a blank held constant at $3.00 so the comparison isolates decoration. Screen printing assumes $25 per screen and the published per-colour tiers; DTG assumes the light-garment tiers; embroidery assumes a 7,000-stitch left chest with $75 digitising paid once.

Total cost per decorated tee, one front placement, light garment, blank held at $3.00. US decorator rates as of 16 August 2026.

Show the working on one cell so the rest is checkable. Screen, 3 colours, 200 pieces: three screens at $25 = $75, spread over 200 = $0.375 a shirt; ink at $1.25 per colour × 3 = $3.75; blank $3.00. Total $7.13.

Four conclusions fall out of that table:

1. On a one- or two-colour design, screen printing wins from 12 pieces up — assuming you find a printer who will run 12. Most will not below 24.
2. On a six-colour or photographic design, DTG is cheaper to roughly 500 pieces and screen printing takes over by 1,000. Six screens is $150 of setup; it needs volume to disappear.
3. Embroidery never reaches screen printing's floor. At 5,000 pieces a one-colour print is $0.66 of decoration and a 7,000-stitch logo is $3.52. Embroidery is a positioning choice, not a cost choice.
4. DTG's curve is almost flat above 250. That is its feature at 1 piece and its problem at 1,000.

The fifth conclusion is the one this site exists to make. At 5,000 pieces a decorated commodity blank costs $3.66 all in, while a custom 180 gsm tee made to your own spec has a landed floor of $5.91 per unit from India — FOB, freight, 16.5% MFN duty under HTS 6109.10.00, the 10% Section 301 forced-labor tariff applying to India as of 16 August 2026, MPF and HMF, none of which amortise. For a plain graphic on a basic tee, decorating a blank wins at essentially any volume. Custom manufacture wins when you need the garment different — fit, weight, fabric, colour, your own labels — not when you need the graphic different. Verify duty lines against the current HTSUS; the method is in how an apparel HTS code is determined.

How fabric changes the print: cotton, blends, fleece and garment-dyed goods

• 100% cotton takes ink predictably. It absorbs, holds cure, and accepts discharge — which only works on reactive-dyed cotton.
• Poly blends carry dye-migration risk. Polyester is coloured with disperse dye, which can sublimate under cure heat and bleed into the ink film, turning a white print pink weeks after delivery. Low-cure inks or a blocker underbase fix it, and both cost money.
• Heavy fleece has a nap. Ink laid on raised fibre sinks and the fibres poke back through. A smoothing pass, a heavier underbase or puff ink solve it; fine detail on a napped face does not survive.
• Garment-dyed goods can bleed and shift shade. Colour is applied after assembly, so batch variation is normal and pigment-dyed pieces have weak wet crocking by design. Print a test piece from the actual dye lot.
• Performance polyester is a sublimation and DTF substrate, not a DTG one.

The dyeing and colour mechanics behind this are in why a custom colour carries a dye-lot minimum, and the vocabulary is defined in the Yarnstick glossary of sourcing and trade terms.

Standard print placements and sizes

Placement is specified in inches from the collar, not by eye. Industry-standard adult layouts: full front 11 inches wide, 3 inches down from the collar line; left chest 3.5 × 2 inches, 2.5–3 inches down and 3.5–4 inches off the centre seam; full back 12 × 14 inches, 3–4 inches down from the rear collar; short sleeve 2.5 × 1 inch. Youth prints scale down 15–20% with placement 2–2.5 inches from the collar. Getting these into the artwork file rather than into an email is covered in artwork file requirements for production.

Terms people use for the same job

Search language here is scattered and none of it signals a real difference. T shirt printing, tshirt printing, shirt printing t shirt, custom t shirt printing, custom t-shirt printing, custom shirt printing, custom print t shirt, custom printed tshirt, custom apparel printing and plain custom printing all describe the same service. Custom screen print shirts and custom t shirts screen printing specify the method. Custom embroidered apparel and custom sweatshirts embroidered are word-order variants. Embroidery and t shirt printing are quoted on completely different bases, though, and that is the only distinction here that changes your invoice. Hoodie economics are in decoration and manufacture on hoodies specifically.

Frequently asked questions