Why small run t-shirts cost more

It is a fair question. You can buy a printed t-shirt for five pounds, and plenty of people do. So what is the other twenty for?

Not branding, mostly. The honest answer is that almost every input is different, and the differences compound.

The blank costs more before anything is printed on it

The plain shirt underneath is where a surprising amount of the gap lives.

A fast fashion tee is usually 130 to 150 GSM, carded open-end cotton, in a loose knit. A heavyweight blank is 180 to 250 GSM in combed ringspun cotton. That is more cotton by weight, better cotton by process, and a tighter knit, and it costs several times more per unit before anyone has touched it. There is more on what those numbers mean in what GSM means on a t-shirt.

You feel it immediately, and you feel it again in year two, when one has gone thin at the shoulders and the other has not.

Volume is doing most of the work in the cheap price

A factory printing fifty thousand of one design spreads its setup across fifty thousand shirts. A run of forty spreads the same setup across forty.

That is not a small difference. Screen printing has real fixed costs per design: making the screens, mixing the ink to the right colour, and setting up and registering the press so each colour lands exactly on the last one. That work takes the same time whether you then print thirty shirts or three thousand.

This is the single biggest reason a small run costs more per tee, and there is no clever way around it. It is arithmetic.

Someone is being paid to stand at the press

Hand printing means a person pulling a squeegee, one shirt and one colour at a time, then curing each one. A four colour design is four passes per shirt, each lined up by hand.

At industrial scale that is an automatic carousel and a fraction of a person's attention. At small scale it is an afternoon.

The print is a different print

The cheapest printed tees are usually digital, sprayed into the fabric, which is fast and needs no setup at all. Screen printing lays opaque ink on top of the fabric instead. It costs more to set up, and it stays bright for years rather than fading with the shirt. The full comparison is in screen printing vs DTG vs vinyl.

So part of what you are paying for is not the shirt arriving nicer. It is the shirt still looking like that after fifty washes, assuming you keep it out of the tumble dryer.

What the cheap price is not counting

The five pound tee is not five pounds because someone found an efficiency nobody else had. It is five pounds because costs were moved somewhere they do not appear on the label: to whoever sewed it, or to the disposal of the unsold stock, or to you buying another one in eight months.

That last one is worth doing the sum on. Three five pound tees over three years is not obviously cheaper than one that lasts, and it is three times the cotton.

What you are actually buying

Being straight about it: a small run tee is a worse deal on day one and a better one after that. If you need a shirt to wear under something twice and forget about, buy the cheap one. Genuinely.

What the money buys is a heavier blank that keeps its shape, a print that outlasts the fabric, and a run of tens rather than tens of thousands, which means the thing is not on everyone.

Every Trials tee is screen printed by hand in the UK in small runs. The about page has more on how they are made, and Time Loop and Golden Hour are what is currently printed.