T-shirts are like Hamburgers

My first job as a teenager was at a Hamburger place in North Carolina. Sure I wanted to work in the Cotton Mill spinning denim or as a floor sweeper at the Cigarette factory but those jobs were beyond my skill level. Like all first jobs it taught me everything I needed to know even though I walked around in a smiley faced smock smelling like grease and had burn marks on my arms from the deep fryer. Those things are fond memories now, it was the akwardness of a spastic kids that was being turned into a production machine that seems like the lessons that were important when it comes to t-shirts. T-shirts are like Hamburgers in that each one ends up on a specific person, but the methods to make them have to be streamlined to the type of product that you want in the end.

The relevance of this is that if you want more than 2-3 colors on less than 144 shirts then it's a pain in the butt and if anything it is going to be so expensive that you won't want to do it. I don't think people really pay for gilded Hamburgers in fancy restaurants as has been noted in the news. The average price of a Hamburger is $2-6, about what you want to pay for a blank t-shirt. Even Carls' Six Dollar burger is $4, but it isn't very good. There are different processes that can get you a multi-colored design on a few shirts, but they are typically digital processes and there are varying degrees of quality.

This is why you hear a sigh in the voice of the t-shirt screen printing manager when you start listing the number of colors and print locations for a 24 shirt job. Most people assume that my pricelist is a mistake when it says n/a for 3-colors at lower quantities so they call to only hear the words "We don't do that". One company that I work with is withdrawing from the internet sales market because of all the time their employees have wasted working on fraudulent and unprintable orders. When they asked how we dealt with the problem the answer is, "Most of my time is spent saying NO". Computers can do a lot of exotic artwork these days, but everything can't just be put on a small run of t-shirts without spending $1000 and turning a six-dollar shirt into a Gilded Hamburger.