Most orders are completed within 5-7 business days of order and artwork submission, approval and payment. Larger orders or orders with special handling may take a few more days. However, our goal is always to make sure that you have your items when you need them. Be sure to tell us if there is a date that you need us to hit and we’ll work to make it happen.
Just one! Keep in mind that generally the more you order, the lower the cost, but whatever you need, we’ve got you covered.
An underbase is a layer of ink that is printed below the rest of the colors in a design and is generally used when printing standard plastisol ink onto darker colored garments. It is our common practice to use an underbase on standard orders that involves plastisol and dark shirt colors. The purpose of the underbase is to give a lighter surface for the top colors to print onto in order to achieve maximum color vibrancy and brightness. While underbase ink is generally white, on 100% polyester garments, we use an a grey underbase specifically designed for polyester. However, sometimes not doing an underbase can leave a really cool “vintage” look and feel to a print. Be sure to talk to your sales rep about NOT using an underbase or moving to waterbased / discharge ink if you’re going for a vintage look or softer feel to the print.
Go big or go home! Our standard print size max is 14” wide x 17” tall, but we can go much larger, all the way up to 39” wide x 32” tall (all over printing). There are different pricing tiers based on print size.
NORMAL: 14” wide x 17” tall
OVERSIZED: 15” wide x 20” tall
JUMBO: 17” wide x 23” tall
JUMBO WIDE: 21” wide x 23” tall
JUMBO TALL: 17” wide x 27” tall
ALL OVER: 39” wide x 32” tall
Get in contact for pricing and details.
Until the kinks are worked out of the Flux Capacitor, we’re ready to do whatever it takes to get your order moving now. Talk to a sales representative about any potential rush that may be involved with your needed timeline.
Yes. Printing without an underbase can be a great way to reduce ink deposit thickness and soften up a print. To get the softest feel to your print, waterbased or discharge ink might be the way to go. Get in contact with us to go over printing options that will keep your print feeling as soft as whatever soft thing pops into your head right now.
Yes, we can accommodate drop shipping an order to one or thousands of locations. There is generally a charge of $10 per location for multiple ship-to locations.
Like any manufacturing process, sometimes the ink hits the fan and a few pieces may be damaged during the printing process to the point of non-repair. If you provide us with the garments (contract printing), we may not have replacement items to use to completely fulfill your order. We always recommend padding your order with a few extra pieces when possible, especially if the order involves specialty or high color printing. Our misprint / defect allowance for contract based orders is 2% by location. If more than this is found to be defective due to our fault, we will replace the missing pieces or offer credits accordingly. If you need your contract order to ship complete, be sure to indicate this on your PO and we will hold your order and contact you to work out what needs to be done in the event of a shortage. If you are relying on us to provide you with both the printing and the garments (full package), then your order will always ship complete. If you receive a full package order and see that items are missing, please contact us and we’ll get to the bottom of it right away.
DTG stands for Direct To Garment. DTG involves the use of an inkjet printer with extremely fancy printheads that print right onto a garment. If a DTG print requires white ink to be printed, then a “pretreat” application that is sprayed onto the shirt prior to printing is necessary to achieve ink adhesion. DTG is generally best for small orders or orders that involve a high amount of ink colors or photographic images. Not to say that we can’t screen print just about anything, but sometimes the costs involved with screen printing lots of colors on a lower quantity of shirts does not make sense when DTG is also a great option.
100% cotton generally works best for Direst to Garment (DTG) printing. Many 50/50 blend and heather materials can also work well, but colors are generally more vibrant on 100% cotton. 100% polyester is generally good to avoid when printing via DTG.
Yes. Our equipment is ready and willing to print pretty much anywhere on a garment. We might suggest fashion base, waterbased or discharge inks when going over seams, collars or zippers to get into the seams and keep the print as smooth and crisp as possible. We’re really good at printing over seams, but it’s important to realize that some distress or distortion to the design can happen over and around seams so it’s often a good idea to create your design with this in mind.
Although it might sound like a ska band that went to your high school, halftones are actually tiny dots that we use to achieve gradients and fades within a design. Since screen printing is done using a screen that either allows ink pass through and onto the garment or not, halftones are necessary when creating shading between colors and even blending colors together to create the appearance of additional colors. These dots are tiny, so you need to look closely to see them. Our standard output for halftones are 55 lpi, elliptical at 22.5 degrees. Brrr!
Spot color generally means a color that you can point to and determine within a design. Although spot colors can involve halftones, we generally call something a spot color if it’s a solid area of color and we can clearly determine it’s color value, like a Pantone color. If you can look at an image and say “that image is blue, red and orange” then it’s probably a spot color design. If you look at an image and say “wow, that image has tons of colors and is tripping me out” then we’d probably call it a process or sim process design.
CMYK. C-Cyan, M-Magenta, Y-Yellow, K-Black. These 4 colors can be used to create pretty much every color possible. 4 color process printing is often used in graphic printing for things like magazines, flyers and brochures. We can also print 4 color process onto apparel. Although we can achieve this print technique on dark colors, it works best on white and light colored garments. For full color screen printing on dark garments, we almost always recommend simulated process.
Simulated process is when we imitate the results of 4 color process using around 10-14 screen printed colors and is a great way to create vibrant, full color images on apparel. It involves halftones and blending of colors to create the illusion of new colors. Simulated process (we often just call it “sim process”) requires a decent amount of artwork prep to create the color separations necessary to create screens properly, so there are some additional artwork fees that you can expect to see. Because of the additional artwork time and materials involved with sim process printing, DTG or Hybrid printing is often a more cost-effective way of producing full color images on apparel at small to mid-sized quantities.
While embroidery can produce an image that contains fine detail, there is a point where the detail will become too small to clearly show up. We generally recommend that text be no smaller than .25” tall (around 18 points). However, it is also important to keep in mind the garment that is being embroidered. A finely constructed item like a baseball hat will allow for more detail to hold than something with a looser material weave, like a knit cap. If you think it might be too small, do us all a favor and size it up a bit. If we see something during the digitizing process that causes concern, we will bring it up and make suggestions to ensure a clean image once embroidered. If you supply the digitized file, please be sure to check with your digitizer to make sure they do not have any concerns or suggestions.
Plastisol ink is our standard ink type and is the most commonly used ink type among printers in the United States. It is traditionally made of PVC particles suspended in a liquid plasticizer with dye resins to create the color. While we do offer other types of ink (discussed next), plastisol is most popular due to its ability to achieve color vibrancy, opacity and maintain flexibility on a variety of garment and material types. When printed, plastisol essential sits “on top” of the fabric and then grabs onto the fabric during the curing process. Since the final ink deposit is on top of the material, it maintains color and detail even after many, many washings. All of our plastisol inks are phthalate compliant to CPSIA standards. We also offer PVC free “plastisol” for instances where a specific job require such.
Waterbased is an ink type that uses water and water-based solvents as the base to distribute the pigment dyes within the ink onto the garment. Unlike plastisol, which leaves an ink deposit that sits “on top” of the fabric, waterbased inks soak “into” the fabric. As the water then evaporates during curing, only the dyes and any other resin or binders involved in the ink are left which leaves a softer feel to the print than you might get with plastisol. Since standard waterbased ink does not contain a high amount of resins or solids that would otherwise create a heavier body to the print, the ink is less opaque and more transparent on the garment. Therefore, waterbased ink works best on light colored garments where the shirt color will not interfere as much with the ink color vibrancy. We also offer High Solids Acrylic (HSA) waterbased ink for times when waterbased is desired but more of that “on top of the shirt” feel and look is important. While HSA inks are a good option in some circumstances, the end result can be similar to plastisol, so we generally move to plastisol or PVC free plastisol depending on the circumstance. Now, let’s talk discharge! Waterbased ink is usually used when the end goal is to keep the print soft, maybe even unnoticeable to the touch. However, waterbased ink does not hold ink color well on darker colors due to its transparent nature. This is where discharge ink comes into play. Discharge is a waterbased ink, but is formulated such that the ink will also remove they dyes in cotton fabric during the curing process, leaving behind a super soft print similar to what a normal waterbase ink would achieve but on a dark garment. Discharge only works fully on cotton, so colors will stay brightest on 100% cotton material. However, blends, especially heather blends, that contain cotton can achieve a really cool result where a vintage or somewhat faded look is acceptable or desired. Since discharge ink relies on the natural or “gauze” color of the fabric prior to being dyed, and since the dyes themselves can display unique properties as they react to discharge ink, exact color matching is not possible with discharge ink and final ink color may vary from shirt to shirt and run to run. Mixed discharge inks have a shelf life of 4-8 hours and the process is a bit more tedious on our end, so you can expect discharge printing to involve some additional cost, but it’s totally worth it if as soft as possible is what you’re going for.
Chino ink, sometimes called “Fashion Soft”, ink is a type of plastisol with a thinner ink base designed to create a softer feeling plastisol print. We can make Chino based ink colors as full on 100% Chino base or mixed ratio with standard base. Chino base does reduce the opacity of ink colors, so this method is generally used where less color vibrancy is needed or on lighter shirt colors. A 100% Chino base print will feel very similar to a waterbased print and is a great option when going for a vintage look on light shirt colors.
We process hundreds of screens per day and therefore need to and reclaim and reuse our screens very frequently. Because of this, we do not hold screens on file for potential future use. However, fear not! Our digital direct to screen making process can recall and make a screen in just minutes, so we’re ready when you are to get a reorder underway. If you pay a set-up fee, you’re not really paying for the screens, but rather the time and materials involved with creating the items needed to set-up your job.
That’s kind of like asking a cook for his spatula. So, no you can’t have the screens. We need those.
