How to Price Custom T-Shirts for Retail and Wholesale

Pricing is the quiet killer of t-shirt brands. Founders obsess over designs and fabric, then set a price by glancing at a competitor and shaving a couple of pounds off — and wonder months later why there’s no money in the bank despite steady sales. Pricing isn’t guesswork; it’s arithmetic followed by strategy. You start by knowing exactly what a shirt costs you, then build a price that funds discounts, returns, marketing and growth. This guide walks through calculating true cost, setting retail and wholesale prices, building bulk tiers and sidestepping the underpricing trap that catches almost every beginner.

Start with your true landed cost

You cannot price what you haven’t fully costed. Most beginners count the blank and the printing and stop there, missing the hidden costs that quietly erode every sale. Your true cost per shirt — the landed cost — includes everything it takes to get a finished, sellable shirt into your hands. List every line, because the ones you forget are the ones that eat your margin.

• The blank garment and the printing or decoration cost.
• Inbound shipping and any import duties or taxes on stock.
• Packaging, labels, tags and polybags.
• Payment processing and platform or marketplace fees.
• A share of marketing, photography and returns/defects.
• Your own time — even if you don’t pay yourself yet, account for it.

Understand margin versus markup

These two terms trip people up constantly. Markup is how much you add on top of cost; margin is the profit as a percentage of the selling price. A shirt that costs you ten and sells for thirty is a 200% markup but only a roughly 67% margin. Always think in margin when you’re assessing whether a business is healthy, because margin is what’s left to run the company after the cost of the product itself.

Setting your retail price

A widely used starting point for printed apparel is to price retail at roughly three to four times your landed cost. That multiple isn’t arbitrary — it has to absorb the discounts you’ll run, the returns you’ll process, the marketing it takes to make each sale and the profit you actually keep. If a shirt lands at ten, a retail price in the low-to-mid thirties is a sensible floor, adjusted up for premium positioning or down only if you genuinely understand the consequences.

1. Calculate your full landed cost per shirt.
2. Multiply by three to four to reach a baseline retail price.
3. Sanity-check against your market and positioning — premium brands can and should charge more.
4. Confirm the price still leaves a healthy margin after a typical discount and return rate.
5. Round to a clean, psychologically sensible price point.

Pricing for wholesale

Wholesale is a different game. When you sell to a retailer, they need to make their own margin, so the standard expectation is that wholesale price is roughly half of your retail (recommended) price — and your cost structure must still leave you a profit at that level. This is exactly why pricing retail too low is so dangerous: if your retail is barely above cost, there’s no room to wholesale at half of it, and you lock yourself out of stockists and bulk buyers entirely. Set a clear recommended retail price (RRP), then your wholesale price beneath it, and protect both — retailers won’t stock you if you routinely undercut them on your own site, so consistency across channels keeps your wholesale relationships alive.

Building bulk and tiered pricing

For custom and bulk orders, tiered pricing rewards larger quantities and reflects your own falling costs at volume — setup is amortised over more units and per-shirt printing drops. A clear tier structure encourages bigger orders, which improves your economics and the customer’s unit price at the same time. Make the tiers transparent so buyers can see the saving and have a reason to round their order up.

• Set bands by quantity — for example 20–49, 50–99, 100–249 and 250+.
• Lower the per-unit price at each band to reflect real cost savings.
• Highlight the saving at the next tier to nudge larger orders.
• Keep a sensible floor so even your biggest tier remains profitable.

Underpricing isn’t generous — it’s a slow way to run out of the cash you need to grow.

Avoiding the underpricing trap, and adjusting as you scale

New founders chronically underprice out of fear that nobody will pay more. But a price too low signals low quality, starves you of margin to reinvest and makes wholesale impossible. Compete on brand, design and quality rather than being the cheapest, because there is always someone willing to go lower and lose money faster, and if you must adjust, it’s far easier to discount from a healthy price than to raise a price you set too low. Remember too that pricing isn’t set once: as your volumes grow your unit costs fall through bulk discounts, and as your brand strengthens its perceived value rises. Revisit your numbers every production cycle, track your real return and discount rates and feed them back in, so your pricing reflects reality rather than a guess you made on day one.

Lower production costs make every pricing equation easier, and that’s where bulk manufacturing pays off. Velocity Wear produces custom tees from a 20-piece minimum with genuine tiered bulk discounts, so your per-unit cost falls as you grow and your margins have room to breathe — with tracked delivery to the UK, USA, Europe and worldwide. Request a free quote with your quantities and we’ll give you clear tiered pricing you can build a profitable retail and wholesale strategy around.