Super Sparkle T-shirts

Auckland Chimera
#1

Hi all,

I’ve done some research on different options and came up with the following:

Brazen
A professional screen printer in Wellington, much patronised by friends of mine who are on sports teams.
Screen set up costs $135. Basic t-shirts cost $10-12 for plain cotton; sports fabrics and bamboo etc are also available (but they didn’t give me costs for those.) http://www.brazenclothing.co.nz/clothing/t-shirts.aspx They also commented that some of the fine detail would be lost.

Price of printing is about:
Run of 7 - $17/print
Run of 8 - $16/print
Run of 10-19 - $13/print
Postage - estimate $5 each

If all 9 of the people who’ve said they’re interested decide to buyt shirts, it works out at:
$46/shirt incl. postage, assuming a cheap t-shirt
If a couple of them drop out, it works out at:
$52/shirt incl. postage, assuming a cheap t-shirt

Zazzle
Basically a print on demand shop that’s run on the internet. I set up a Super Sparkle shop as an experiment, with some sample t-shirt and mug designs, but you can drill down into a design and change the shirt type and colours as you like. http://www.zazzle.co.nz/daisyninjagirl (This bit was fun!)

A cheap t-shirt option would come out at around $18 for the t-shirt and $13 for postage. They’ve got a bunch of slicker choices around the $30-40/shirt mark (or even $50-60 for hoodies and that.) If you’re buying multiple t-shirts at a time, your postage goes up marginally, they also say that if you buy in lots of 11 or more they start giving discounts, but I suspect that no-one’s quite that keen. :wink: If you want to get stuff from here, be careful about checking the size charts, they’ve got some funny idea about how big real people are, especially for women’s fitted t-shirts.

I’m leaning towards the Zazzle option, because it’s geared towards small orders and multi-colour printing, it’s not dependent on a minimum number of people wanting to get stuff at the same time, and it’ll work out cheaper unless a whole lot more people want to get stuff in the same order. I do have a disclosure about money - this site is set up so that people upload their artwork and collect a royalty on sales. This pays out if the royalties get up to $25; if sales get to this point I’ll make it over to NZ Larps as fundraising.

There will be other vendors out there, but I expect that they’ll be somewhat similar to these options. If anyone has a good alternate suggestion, or there’s an outpouring of support for the screenprinting option, let me know, otherwise go for your life in ordering internet goodies. :slight_smile:

#2

From what I’ve heard, screen printing lasts a lot longer than many other options of printing on t-shirts.

#3

It might be worth talking to Nick Cole, I think he handles the tshirt making for Kapcon.

#4

[quote=“Tetrajak”]From what I’ve heard, screen printing lasts a lot longer than many other options of printing on t-shirts.[/quote]The main issue with screen printing is that the setup cost is high, and it’s particularly high for your design because it’d need four screens made to get all the colour variation. Do you maybe have ideas on a simpler one or two colour logo that would screen print better (and more cheaply)?

#5

Now I hope you’re not including that yellow background in your printing plans. A colour rectangle like that on a t-shirt would look terrible.

As for a simpler design, what I did is what I’d consider simple, but I get what you mean; simpler than what I’ve provided. Sure, I could provide you with a simpler one. How about a simple flat-coloured version without the fancy textures? We can keep the sparkles, right?

#6

Their quote was for without the yellow background. Basically, as you’ve designed it, they’d need to do 4 screens, and it still wouldn’t come out with as much texture or detail. My sports buddies tend to concentrate on one or two colour designs without many fiddly bits and they get good results.

Yes, you can keep the sparkles. :wink: But seriously, my main goal out of this exercise has been to get a nice t-shirt for me and Cat, which I can achieve right now, even if it will wear faster than a screenprinted t-shirt. Arranging t-shirts for other people is variously: a favour; an ego-massaging attempt to spread our meme throughout NZ as a small step in our sinister plan to take over the world.

Do people out there want to take a vote on if it’s worth pursuing the screen printing option (assuming the price goes down with a simpler logo.)?

#7

I am in favour of something that would go through a warm wash and come out intact, and something that would survive until the next chimera. This thing is screenprinting.

#8

And I have a new printing quote, based on a much simpler design (pink and black letters and no sparkles, alas.)

For a two colour print, the set up fee goes down to $75, and the unit price becomes $10/print.

If all 9 of the people who’ve said they’re interested decide to buyt shirts, it works out at:
$34/shirt incl. postage, assuming a cheap t-shirt
If a couple of them drop out, it works out at:
$36/shirt incl. postage, assuming a cheap t-shirt

If I get at least seven people signed up with a t-shirt size, colour and style by, say, the end of Friday, I’ll put the order through.
(Sorry, Tetrajak, screenprinting isn’t really intended for small print runs.)