Custom apparel does more than make your team look cohesive; it turns employees into everyday brand ambassadors, elevates your presence at events, and creates a lasting impression on customers. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the options—garments, decoration methods, timelines, and budgets—you’re not alone. The good news is that a thoughtful process makes everything smoother, more predictable, and ultimately more successful. What follows is a step-by-step journey through the essentials, with special attention paid to two cornerstone decoration methods: screen printing and embroidery.
Begin by getting exceptionally clear about purpose and audience. Are you outfitting a retail team with daily uniforms, producing giveaways for a trade show, building a merch store to generate revenue, or welcoming new hires with swag?
Each use case sets different expectations for durability, feel, and appearance. Think about where the apparel will be worn—an office, warehouse, gym, or outdoor jobsite—and how you want it to be perceived: polished and understated, bold and promotional, or somewhere in between. An outdoor team might need moisture-wicking performance fabrics and high-visibility colors, while a corporate setting might favor clean, minimal designs and premium textures.
Preparing Your Design Files
Next, assemble a brand toolkit that’s production-ready. This is the step that prevents delays, color mismatches, and frustrating back-and-forth later. Make sure you have vector logo files (AI, EPS, or SVG) or, if vector isn’t possible, high-resolution raster artwork at 300 DPI at final size. Document your brand colors with Pantone references—Pantone Solid Coated numbers are particularly helpful for apparel—and include acceptable CMYK and RGB fallbacks for context. For embroidery, ask your vendor to match threads from their preferred chart (Madeira and Isacord are common), and record those thread codes once approved. Include typographic guidance and any rules about clear space, minimum sizes, and background color restrictions. If your brand has co-branding rules, capture them now so you don’t need emergency approvals later.
Choosing Your Apparel
With brand assets ready, choose the garment you’d like your local custom apparel company to use. This decision is more than style; it’s about performance, comfort, and how decoration methods will behave. T-shirts are the staple: ringspun or combed cotton offers a softer hand and takes screen print ink beautifully, while cotton/poly blends reduce shrinkage and can feel lighter. Performance polyester makes sense for active or outdoor teams, but printers may need specialty inks and lower cure temperatures to avoid dye migration. Polos pair naturally with embroidery for a polished look, especially in moisture-wicking fabrics used by field teams. Hoodies and sweatshirts vary in weight—lighter fleece feels more casual while heavyweight conveys premium warmth—and cotton-rich blends typically print better than high-poly constructions. Hats are most often embroidered; structured caps can support 3D puff embroidery while unstructured dad caps and beanies favor flatter stitches. For outerwear, embroidery and patches tend to outperform screen printing, as water-resistant coatings can repel ink. As you select, consider size inclusivity and fit—offer a thoughtful size range and, if possible, organize a try-on to reduce returns. Color also matters: dark garments often require a white underbase when screen printing to keep colors vibrant, while very light garments may need specific backing choices in embroidery to prevent the bobbin thread from showing through.
Understanding Custom Apparel Decoration MethodsThe flexibility of screen printed apparel
At the heart of custom apparel are the decoration methods. Screen printing and embroidery each have distinct strengths. Screen printing pushes ink through a mesh screen onto fabric, with one screen per color. It excels at bold graphics, vivid color fields, and large prints—think full front or back on tees and hoodies. It’s cost-efficient at scale, though each added color increases setup costs.
As the t-shirt printing company in St. Louis, Left hand Promotion, states: “On dark garments, printers often lay down a white underbase first so colors “pop,” and that counts as another color. You’ll hear about ink types: plastisol is the industry workhorse—durable, vibrant, and consistent—while water-based and discharge inks offer a softer, more “in-the-fabric” feel that many people love on 100% cotton.”
Specialty inks can add effects like puff, metallic, or high density. Fine detail depends on mesh counts and art separations, so ask your printer about their minimums for line thickness and type size if you’re pushing intricacy.
Dye migration—when polyester dye bleeds into light inks—can be controlled with blockers and low-bleed inks. Proper curing ensures wash durability; reputable shops build quality control around this. Lead times are often in the one- to three-week range after art approval, with costs driven by the number of colors, print locations, garment type, and quantity. Price breaks at quantities like 24, 48, 72, and 144 can be substantial.
The boldness of embroidered apparel
Embroidery, by contrast, stitches your design with thread, creating a dimensional, premium look that customers and employees associate with quality. It shines on polos, hats, jackets, and left-chest placements. The process begins with digitizing—turning your art into a stitch file that dictates stitch type, density, underlay, and the path the needle will follow. This is a one-time setup per design and size, and it significantly influences the final appearance. Pricing scales with stitch count; a typical left-chest logo might run 5,000 to 10,000 stitches. Small text and delicate serifs don’t always translate well into thread, so plan for uppercase letters at least 4–5 mm tall and stroke widths around a millimeter.
The fabric must be stabilized with backing to prevent puckering, and stretchier or lighter fabrics need more support. Polyester thread offers excellent durability and colorfastness for uniforms and frequent laundering, while rayon has a rich sheen popular in fashion applications. If you want extra pop, 3D foam (often called “puff”) can add height on structured caps, and applique or patches can reduce stitch counts while adding texture. Lead times are similar to printing, with a bit of extra time for digitizing and approving a sew-out (a test embroidery) before the full run.
Finding the best company to create your apparel
Deciding between screen printing and embroidery comes down to look, feel, use case, and budget. Screen printing is ideal for large, graphic-driven designs on tees and fleece, and it remains attractive cost-wise at higher quantities, especially with fewer colors. Embroidery conveys polish on polos, hats, and outerwear, and it tends to wear exceptionally well in uniform contexts. Many companies leverage both: printed tees for events and casual days, embroidered polos and jackets for meetings and field work, and embroidered hats as versatile swag.
Most cities will have a local apparel company that can handle most of their tasks. There are also companies like Left Hand Promotions in St. Louis that provide custom apparel printing services to companies nationwide without functioning like large corporations.
