How it is made
Embroidery or print on a training tee: what actually survives the wash
The two techniques are not two styles of the same thing. They fail differently, they are priced differently, and one of them physically cannot render what you drew. Here is what we learned building both.
If you have ever ordered a shirt with your club name on it, someone asked you "embroidered or printed?" and you probably picked on price. That is a reasonable way to choose and it is also how people end up with a design that looks nothing like the file they sent. The difference is physical.
Ink versus thread
Direct-to-garment printing puts ink onto the fabric and bonds it to the fibre. The result sits flat, weighs nothing, and can reproduce anything an image file can hold: photographs, gradients, hairline detail, a hundred colours at no extra cost. It also lives on the surface, and over enough wash cycles a print fades, softens and — on a heavily loaded area — cracks.
Embroidery is thread stitched through the cloth. There is nothing on the surface to wear off, so it does not fade or crack; barring a snagged thread it outlasts the garment. It also has texture and a small amount of stiffness, and it cannot render a photograph, a gradient, or fine detail. It is a different medium, not a more durable version of the same one.
The number that decides everything: the stroke floor
The constraint people never see coming is how thin a stitched line can be. In our own work the practical floor is around 1.2 mm of stroke width, and around 1.0 mm for a counter or a gap — the hole in an "o", the space between two letters — measured at final size on the garment.
Go under it and satin stitch stops behaving like a line. The needle penetrations crowd together, the thread has nowhere to sit, and the letter closes into a blob. It looks perfect on screen at 300 dpi and it is a smudge on cotton. There is no software fix; it is a property of thread and fabric.
Embroidered text is bold, condensed and small — not because that is the taste, but because it is the only thing that holds.
This is why a delicate script logo that looks beautiful in a vector file comes back from the embroiderer as an unreadable mess, and why every well-made embroidered wordmark you own is chunkier than you remember. If you want fine, light, or large-and-delicate lettering, you want print.
What we do with it
Our embroidered pieces put one short line across the chest, stitched in pure black thread on white cotton, in a block 3.50 in (89 mm) wide. That width is not a design flourish — it is what fits in the chest-centre placement while keeping every stroke above the floor. The constraint wrote the brief. See the catalog for the full spec of each one.
How the two are priced, and why it surprises people
Print cost is essentially independent of how many colours you use, and scales with the printed area. A one-colour word and a full-colour photograph on the same shirt cost about the same to produce.
Embroidery cost scales with stitch count — the number of needle penetrations — which tracks the filled area, not the number of colours. A solid block of stitching is expensive; the same shape as an outline is cheap. There is usually also a one-off digitising charge, because the artwork has to be converted into a stitch path before anything can be sewn. That is a setup cost paid once per design, not per shirt, and it is the reason a one-garment embroidery order feels absurdly expensive and a hundred-garment order does not.
The practical consequence for a small brand: embroidery pushes you toward small, sparse, typographic designs, because that is what is cheap to stitch. Print pushes you toward big graphics, because area is what you are paying for either way.
Which one for a garment you will actually sweat in
A few things we would tell a friend, clearly labelled as our opinion rather than a measurement:
- Keep embroidery small and keep it off contact points. Stitching is slightly stiff and slightly abrasive. A chest-centre block is fine. A large embroidered panel where a race vest strap, a backpack strap or a weight belt rides is asking for a hot spot.
- Prefer print for anything photographic or detailed. Not as a compromise — as the correct tool.
- If it is a shirt you want in five years, embroider it. This is the one place embroidery is simply better, and the gap is not small.
- Wash a printed garment inside out and cool. Most print failure is mechanical abrasion in the drum, not the ink giving up.
The made-to-order part
Everything we make is produced after someone orders it. No stock is held and nothing is overproduced, which is the reason the range can be six designs instead of six hundred, and also the reason delivery is slower than stocked retail. That trade is deliberate and we would rather state it than bury it in a shipping FAQ.