Colour Matching Bulk T-Shirts
By The Velocity Wear Team
A Pantone reference gets ink close to your brand colour, but fabric is not paper and dyed cotton is not ink. Expect a very good match on a printed graphic and a close approximation on a dyed garment body. Batch variation between dye lots is normal and small. Send a Pantone number rather than a screenshot, and sample if the colour is the brand.
Can you match a Pantone exactly?
On a print, we mix ink to a Pantone reference and get very close. The remaining difference comes from the surface it lands on: the same ink reads slightly differently on a smooth blend than on an open cotton knit, and slightly differently again on a dark garment where an underbase sits beneath it. That is physics, not carelessness, and it is why a printed swatch beats a number on a screen.
On a dyed garment body, the honest answer is closer to a good approximation. Garment dyeing works from a stock palette, and hitting an arbitrary Pantone in the cloth itself is a different and much larger job than matching ink. If your brand colour has to be the shirt rather than the print, tell us early and we will tell you what is achievable rather than guessing in a quote. The terminology on either side of this is in the glossary.
Why does the colour vary between batches?
Dyeing is a wet chemical process run in lots. Two lots of the same shade, dyed weeks apart, can differ by an amount you would never see on their own but can see when the two shirts are held side by side. Every apparel manufacturer works with this. It is why a reorder of the same shirt six months later is not guaranteed to be indistinguishable from the first run.
The way to manage it is practical rather than technical. If you need a consistent body colour across a large programme, order the whole quantity in one run rather than topping up, even if that means going up a price tier. It happens to be cheaper too: the tiers run 50 to 99, 100 to 249, 250 to 499, 500 to 999 and 1,000 plus, with up to 35% off the 50-piece rate at the top. From-prices start at $13 a piece on the wholesale t-shirts page. The question of matching colour across two different garment types is a harder one, covered in can two different garments match in colour.
What should you send to get the colour right?
Send the Pantone solid coated reference for each colour in the artwork, as a number, in writing. Do not send a screenshot, a JPEG or a colour picked off a website, because a screen is backlit and a shirt is not, and every monitor is calibrated differently. If you have a physical item in the right colour, say so and we will work from that instead, which is usually better than any number.
Also say which colours are load-bearing. Most artwork has one colour that is genuinely the brand and two or three that simply need to look right. Knowing which is which lets us put the effort where it matters. What else belongs in that first message is set out in briefing a supplier for t-shirts.
When is a sample worth it for colour?
Whenever the colour is the thing being judged. If your brand is known by a specific shade, if the shirt sits next to printed material at an event, or if the order is large enough that a disappointment is expensive, take the £150 sample. It is credited against the bulk order, and it turns an argument about a screenshot into a decision about an object you are holding.
Look at it in daylight and under the lighting where the shirt will actually be worn, because artificial light shifts colours considerably. Then approve on the physical sample rather than the digital proof, and keep it. It becomes your reference for every future run of that shirt.
