How to Design Cheap Custom Shirts

When making custom-ordered shirts, it's important to be able to serve buyers who want to keep their prices down. However, it's not necessary to sacrifice quality and variety in design; if you understand some general guidelines for cost-effective design, you can still create any type of individually-modeled shirt design within those boundaries.

Things You'll Need

• Pattern drafting tools
• Sketchpad

Instructions

1. Use inexpensive materials. Prices vary, but some types of fabric, such as those made from rarer animal parts (such as silk, leather or cashmere) are always more expensive than more plentiful, plant-based cloths like polyester/cotton blends and linen.

2. Avoid labor-intensive sewing designs. Stay away from lots of folds and tricky shapes that are difficult to get right, especially if your shirts will be made using any kind of automated process. Limit the number of hand-sewn decorations, such as buttons and beads, as those will increase labor costs.

3. Favor concepts that use less fabric. You can keep the cost of the shirts down if you're able to make more of them with less fabric. Short-sleeved, single layer shirts designed to be pulled-over are preferable to longer shirts with folds or collars and multiple layers.

4. Design any screen-printing for simplicity. Limit the number of ink colors as much as possible. Favor text over graphic design to avoid more artist fees. If you are getting graphics, keep them simple; if possible, work with a screen printer who is also a designer and knows how to create graphics that will only require one screen in order to keep materials and labor costs low.

5. Facilitate mass-production, if possible. Give your purchaser choices that can easily be mixed and matched, making each shirt unique but limiting the number of actual processes needed to make them. Offer a choice of colors, designs and decorations that can be used in combination and that work well when mixed.

References

• "The Fundamentals of Fashion Design"; Jenny Udale and Richard Sorger; 2006