What Is The Difference Between Company Shirt Printing And Corporate Shirt Embroidery?

So, you have been interested in having some company shirts made either his uniforms or as something for solidarity and for various people to wear at events when they are representing your business. Maybe you want different shirts for different teams to cultivate some friendly competition within your business, any number of things like that.

Custom shirts like this have been a common thing to use for this as well as an affordable, memorable gift for attendees and customers, and of course, an extremely effective form of guerrilla advertising far less obnoxious than old traditional forms of advertising like commercials, junk mail, etc. I doubt I need to proselytize to you the merits of custom shirts, but it can be a little confusing, because there are a few different ways these custom shirts can be made.

So, what is the difference between company shirt printing and corporate shirt embroidery? Well, it all comes down to how they are manufactured, and this affects the type of shirt you actually get. One of these is drastically cheaper than the other, while the other is a higher quality but also limits the flexibility of the graphic you can put on the shirt.

Let’s start with shirt printing, because it is the cheaper and more common way to do it. The modern approach is a descendent of the silk screening process, and is also the same basic technology behind iron on sheets that people get as prizes or order online and then apply to shirts at home with, unsurprisingly, and iron. You basically give the company a high-resolution version of the graphic you want, and it’s usually polite if you mirror the image before you give it to them to save them a step. It has to be backwards to apply to the shirt in the proper orientation. It is then printed out using pigments instead of ink, and then it is placed facedown on the shirt and heat issues from either a press or an iron to cause the pigment to sublimate and stain the fabric. It’s really not that complicated is it? It does fade over time from repeated washes and exposure to UV, but it is faster and cheaper to do and allows for much more complicated graphics.

Embroidery is much more expensive. You can give them the same big graphic, but you have to expect things like complicated shading and physically-impossible graphical shapes to simply not be possible to put on the shirt. It can only really use solid colors and simple, Euclidean shapes. These are derived from Vector pathways created based on the image provided, and then an automated cutting rig will cut out the shapes. From here, a person has to actually place the shapes in the appropriate order on the shirt, and then either hand-embroider them onto it or have a similar machine perform the action.

The result of corporate shirt embroidery, compared to company shirt printing, is the fact that it is heavier, more durable and it does look classier. Nice, pleasant materials like felt and silk can be used, etc.