Monday, May 7, 2012

T-shirts without tags - Is there such a thing?

A common request I get is for t-shirts without tags. Although I sell several styles of shirts that have tear-away tags, removable labels inside the collar, some of the shirts on the market that are called "tagless" in fact have tags that are laminated inside the collar. These transfer printed tags in the collar cannot be removed and although they are tagless there is no way to get rid of the company name that identifies the garment. I am very sorry, but when I get request for shirts with absolutely no tags, I have taken to asking the potential customer, "How will you know what you have?" Most customers haven't considered this problem, but today I had a customer respond with, "I'll just compare them to each other and figure out what size they are". Good idea if you want to waste all your time sorting shirts. I do sympathize with the customer in this situation because even tags that are removable they require some work and effort to cleanly remove the label. Any label can be cut out of a shirt, but yes, there is going to be some remnant of the tag in the shirt. Unless you have a seamstress that is willing to cut the threads inside the collar cleanly this would be way more trouble than it is worth. My opinion is that you just have to be crafty in this situation and it is nearly impossible to imitate a large company product effect by removing and sewing in your own labels. May people cut or remove the tags and then print inside the collar the size and the name they want to represent. This works, but it is the same work and cost of doing a one-color print on the front or back of a shirt. Economically this doesn't seem like a good idea, but for style reasons some people will spend the money to do this. Keep in mind you have to have a layout for each size of the shirts you are printing, so you need a design for the small, medium, large, xlarge...

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