This was written in May 2026. This is of no interest to most people, and of great interest to a few people who, like me, are in the position of placing a large order of shirts from CustomInk.
This post also does not address whether you should go with CustomInk – they are simply the established vendor at conferences I am familiar with. I think they are a good vendor if your designs are simple. They are a terrible vendor if you have a complex design and don’t know about 8 key things they don’t tell you upfront, and are not documented anywhere in their customer guidelines. If you know the things, I think they wrap around to being good again.
Quick note on what I mean by simple and complex designs:
In summary:
- If you are ordering for a conference, email them and say you want a dedicate representative to coordinate a big order. If you do not do this, you will get a different rep every time you email them with a question.
- Do not trust samples. They use a softer, higher-fidelity method (DTG) for orders under 6 shirts than the method they use for big batches (screen printing). Unless you’re willing to drop $150 on a sample, you should assume you have one shot at getting this right.
- If you are ordering for a conference, maximize the (width) of the design when placing it on the shirt in the design interface. They do not change the size of the design between a small shirt and an XL shirt. If it looks small on the S, it will look tiny on the XL. What you see on the interface matches the S.
- If your design fills the whole width of a shirt, left to right, and the image file is 3300 pixels wide, the minimum stroke thickness you can have is about 11 pixels. Anything thinner will get thickened.
- I have 10 colors on the front. That’s probably close to the maximum they can do, because their recent blog post lists 1-8 ink colors as the desired range.
- You can avoid the above two constraints if you have enough time. You CAN get the higher-fidelity printing method (DTG) for a large order, but you need to apply for an exception and they do not do it for rush orders (because of load on fragile and expensive printer hardware). I don’t know what their timeline/count curve looks like, but based on vibes across 50 emails, I think I could have gotten a DTG exception for 700 shirts had I placed the final order 3 weeks before I needed it. Maybe even 2.
- Conversely, if you are in a huge rush – because, say, you’re waiting until the last minute for sponsors to come in – you should know that their very nice sounding “3 business day super rush shipping” is a lie. I was given Thursday 9am as the final design submission time for a super rush order that had to arrive the subsequent Thursday – even though, right now, their website says “order by 11am (today, Wednesday)” to get it by Monday. I’m sure the actual time depends on the complexity of the order. In our case, we have 10 colors on the front, a simple sponsor text on the back, and have 730 shirts. That takes a week. But you would not know it from the website’s FAQ or the text on shipping option.
- Screen printed shirts feel a bit thicker where the design is applied. If you have a design with a lot of white and black strokes on it, you might think you can avoid having a big stiff area on your shirt by sending them two different PNGs for white and black shirt – one file where the black is omitted, one where the white is omitted, so that the shirt’s color fills in it. This way you have gaps between the stiff areas where the fabric can flex as the human moves. Don’t even think about it. They want one PNG on all the shirt colors. I gave them two PNGs very early on and they didn’t tell me this until the day of, which brings me to:
- They will not let you talk directly to the technicians who convert your image to a screen printing format. The art techs only give you feedback when you have already paid and are giving them a design to order. So much of what I’d listed, I could have found out on day 1 if I got on a screenshare videocall with them for 15m to look at their software and how images get converted to screen printing.
- This one is speculative, but the techs may fuck up the layer order, so if you have a color that is particularly important to be the same thickness everywhere (say, black lineart) you might have to explicitly ask them to put it on the top or bottom.
Representatives
By default, you will be put in touch with an order representative after placing an order, not before. To get in touch with them earlier, email [email protected] or call their number and say you want a representative immediately to coordinate a big order.
You will get a different rep every time you email them with a question. After I got 4 people of varying quality, I asked to work with a single one (naming my preference) and got assigned a dedicated rep (although not my named preference).
Be wary of ordering samples, because they use different printing methods for different order sizes.
DTG (”direct to garment”) is what they do for small orders (under 6). The whole shirt goes under the printer and the result is relatively soft, and the design feels like it is part of the shirt.
Screen printing is what they do for huge ones. Screen printing has slightly raised/bumpy ink. This is fine for “lineart” art. (The 2025 shirt felt fine.) I think this is possibly bad for big blocks of color. I ordered a sample specifically because I was afraid of texture problems, but unfortunately they used DTG and I was unable to find out what a shirt with a large area of screen-printed art feels like.
You can get DTG for huge orders, but your rep will have to apply for an exception to get access to the DTG printers, which will be put under a lot of strain for a huge order. So they generally do not do DTG for rush orders.
On the other hand, you cannot get screen printing for under 6 shirts.
Design size
The design is the same size on every shirt. They do not scale the design for different shirt sizes! I ordered an S and XL for my samples, choosing less than the maximal size the design could take up on the shirt. It looked really small on the XL.
This was not noticeable on previous years’ shirts where the design did in fact take up most of the available space – so, err on doing that rather than leaving tasteful gaps.
You can ask for different scales for different shirts, but this means they have to manufacture extra screens for each scale and this costs more. The somewhat unclear pricing I got on this was: “The cost for the Various Sized Screen service depends on your design’s color count and applies per print location: - 1 color = 40 - 3 colors = 70.”
Colors / gradients
A comment from them specifically on manufacturing time (not cost): “Gradients aren’t really an issue on our end, and removing them would still result in the same turnaround time for the order.”
Ordering timeline
CustomInk has 2 week normal delivery, 1 week rush delivery, and 3 business day super rush delivery.
There’s a team specifically trying to fulfill the delivery promises for bulk orders. (They told me this in their response to an email I sent after their 1 week delivery for samples took 9 days.) That said, it’s easier for them to meet the 1 week delivery if the design is simpler.