The short version. Price a custom shirt by costing two things separately. First the blank, including the 2XL and 3XL upcharges on the pieces that actually need them. Then the decoration, in the units its method bills in — DTF per square inch of film, vinyl per square inch plus the minutes it takes to weed, screen print per ink color, embroidery per thousand stitches. Add setup once per job, divide it across the run you are quoting, and divide the total cost by one minus your target margin.
Every figure below is an illustrative example chosen to show the method — not a price list. Your film, ink, thread and blank prices, your machine rates and your own labor rate will all differ, which is exactly why a file you can change beats a number somebody else picked.
A shirt is two products, and you probably only priced one
The blank has a price on an invoice. Anyone can look it up, your customer included, and there is almost no money in it. The decoration has no invoice at all — its cost is scattered across square inches of film, minutes of weeding, screens you burned last Tuesday, and thousands of stitches the machine is running while you eat lunch.
That is the half that pays you, and it is the half most often priced by feel.
Pricing by feel works, roughly, until your mix changes: the first big embroidery order, the first team that wants names and numbers, the first customer who wants sixty pieces of something you have only ever done twelve of.
Step 1 — Work out your loaded shop rate first
Add up one month of overhead — rent, power, the equipment payment, insurance, software, marketing, the fees the bank takes — and divide it by the hours you actually produce in.
Say that comes to $2,015 a month across 130 production hours. That is $15.50 an hour just to have a shop, before you have earned anything. Add the hourly you intend to earn — $28 — and your loaded shop rate is $43.50 an hour.
Every minute of pressing, weeding, hooping and setup gets charged at that rate. It is what stops you describing work as “it only took a few minutes.”
Count production hours honestly, and count everything the shop pays you for: pressing, hooping, weeding, quoting, ordering blanks, packing, and answering the customer who wants to know if you can put a logo on a beanie. Halve the hours and the shop cost carried by every job doubles.
Step 2 — Cost the blank, including the size upcharge
Take your real cost per piece at the quantity you actually buy, then find the 2XL and 3XL upcharges on the same invoice.
For 24 ring-spun tees at $4.10, four of them 2XL at $2.20 more:
- 24 × $4.10 = $98.40
- 4 × $2.20 = $8.80
- Blanks total: $107.20
Ask for the size breakdown before you quote. Size upcharges are easy money to skip — they are real, they are per piece, and they arrive precisely when an order gets big.
Step 3 — Cost the decoration in its method’s own units
This is the step a flat decoration fee skips. There is no such thing as “the decoration cost” — there are four different ones.
| Method | What it bills you in | The thing that catches shops out |
|---|---|---|
| DTF transfer | Square inches of film, plus ink and adhesive powder | Cost scales with area, so a full back is a multiple of a left chest. Nest tightly on gang sheets — the large film sheets several designs are printed on at once. |
| Heat-transfer vinyl | Square inches of vinyl — and then minutes of weeding (picking the excess vinyl away by hand) | A detailed design can cost more in your time than the vinyl cost in dollars. |
| Screen print | Ink per color per piece, plus a screen to burn per color | Below about 24 pieces the setup is the job. Every extra color is another screen and another registration pass. |
| Embroidery | Thousands of stitches, plus thread and backing | Stitch count is the price, and you do not know it until the design is digitized. A dense 2-inch crest can outrun a light 5-inch script. |
Sublimation and pressed plastisol transfers add two more: square inches of paper and ink for one, and a flat per-transfer cost for the other.
For our 24 shirts, a left-chest DTF at roughly 16 square inches works out to about $1.02 a shirt in film, powder, ink and press time.
Step 4 — Charge machine time and your time separately
An embroidery machine sews without you standing over it, so those stitching minutes never draw your wage. (Why embroidery is priced by stitch count, rather than by how big the design looks.) Charge your hands-on minutes — hooping, trimming, color changes — at the loaded shop rate, and the machine’s own hourly cost for as long as the station is tied up.
Get this backwards and the damage is one-directional. Bill 25,000 stitches at a full labor rate, as though you stood and watched every one, and you will price yourself out of every jacket order you ever quote.
Step 5 — Add setup once, then divide it by the run
Burning a screen, digitizing a logo, cutting and weeding a test piece — these happen once whether the job is six pieces or six hundred.
Our left-chest DTF has almost no setup: about $2.90, which is a few minutes of your time lining the first shirt up. So the decoration on 24 shirts is (24 × $1.02) + $2.90 = $27.38.
Embroidery is where this bites. A left-chest logo at 6,000 stitches costs about $4.59 a shirt in thread, backing and machine time — and the job carries roughly $33.80 of digitizing and machine setup on top, once. Spread that setup across the run, hold the same 50% margin as everything else and round up to the next quarter, and the same logo prices at:
- $20.50 a shirt at six pieces
- $12.00 a shirt at twenty-four
- $10.75 a shirt at forty-eight
At six pieces, the setup alone is adding $5.63 to what every shirt costs you. At forty-eight it is adding seventy cents. Nothing about the design changed — the digitizing simply got divided by more shirts. That is what a quantity break actually is — not a discount you are choosing to give, but arithmetic you can show the customer.
It also tells you when to switch methods. At six pieces, a screen-printed job is mostly screens; a DTF transfer barely notices the run size. A shop with both quotes small runs on film and large runs on screens, and never argues with anyone about it.
Step 6 — Hold your margin, and quote the run size out loud
Add the two halves and divide by one minus your target margin.
- Blanks: $107.20
- Decoration: $27.38
- Job cost: $134.58
- At a 50% gross margin: $134.58 ÷ 0.5 = $269.16 — round that up to the next quarter a shirt and you quote $11.25 a shirt, or $270 for the order
Then quote the run size alongside the price. When a customer pushes back, the honest levers are a cheaper blank, a simpler decoration or a bigger run — never a thinner margin, which you will not notice bleeding for a year.
The one-off problem
Run this honestly on a single monogrammed towel with a design that has never been digitized, and you get a price no customer will ever pay for a towel.
That is the math working, not failing. It is telling you three real things at once: charge digitizing as its own line rather than burying it, do not quote new embroidery on a single piece, and this is precisely what a minimum order is for. Once that design is digitized, its setup drops to nothing and every reorder is the cheap job it now is.
Where a spreadsheet stops being enough
Costing one job is arithmetic. Running a shop is the same arithmetic across a catalog of blanks, six methods, a queue of orders with deposits and proof approvals, and a shelf that has to be reordered before a job stalls.
The Custom-Apparel Shop Order & Pricing Workbook does that end to end — a one-time purchase you keep. It computes the decoration cost per method, prices every spec at your margin and at 12 and 48 pieces, turns it into a quote with size upcharges applied per piece, and runs the order queue that follows.
If you just want the costing half, the free Decoration Cost Calculator does that one tab, with six worked examples pre-filled and no signup.
A note on the numbers
Every figure here is illustrative. Film, vinyl, ink and thread prices, machine rates, and your own labor rate vary widely — the point is the method, not the numbers. The stitch-count bands and method minimums are common small-shop starting points rather than an industry standard: confirm them against the actual blank and the actual digitized file before you press or sew. This is a business reference, not tax, accounting or legal advice.
