T-Shirts for Bands: cost
By The Velocity Wear Team
Custom t-shirts for a band start at $13 a piece at our 50-piece minimum, and the rate drops through five quantity tiers from there, reaching up to 35% below the 50-piece price on the largest runs. The size or detail of your artwork does not move the number. Quantity does. A 250-shirt tour run costs noticeably less per piece than a 50-shirt test of the same graphic.
What does a band t-shirt actually cost per piece?
The $13 figure is the rate at 50 pieces on a standard tee: 150 to 240 GSM combed ring-spun cotton, cut regular or boxy. Treat it as a floor rather than an average. Heavier cloth, a second print position or a garment colour that needs its own screens all sit above it. The wholesale t-shirts page carries the current from-price, and the bands and music merch page shows what touring acts usually order alongside the tees.
Why does the price fall as the run grows?
Most of what you pay on a small run is preparation, not cloth. Screens are burned once per colour, the press is set once, and the first shirt carries exactly the same setup as the five hundredth. Spread that work over more pieces and the per-shirt figure drops. We break the arithmetic down further in where the money goes on a bulk t-shirt order.
- 50–99 — the entry tier, priced from the 50-piece rate.
- 100–249 — the usual size for a run of UK dates.
- 250–499 — where a headline tour or a webstore drop tends to land.
- 500–999 and 1,000 plus — the deepest tiers, reaching up to 35% below the 50-piece rate.
Should a first tour run be 50 or 250?
Fifty is the minimum per design, and for an untested graphic it is the sensible number — you find out whether the shirt sells before you tie money up in it. The catch is that 50 is also the most expensive tier per piece, so a design you already know moves is being bought at the worst rate you will ever pay for it.
Most acts end up splitting the difference. Order the proven design deep, where the tier discount does real work, and put the new graphic in at 50. Sizes mix freely inside each 50, so the spread from S to XXL is entirely yours to set; our size-split guide covers how to pitch it against a merch table rather than a shop rail.
What adds cost beyond the shirt itself?
Three things, mostly. Extra print positions, because a back print or a sleeve hit is a second setup rather than a free addition. Extra colourways, since a second garment colour needing its own screens counts as a separate 50. And private label finishing — woven neck labels, tear-out labels and swing tags sit on top of the garment price, though they are what turns a printed blank into something that feels like a product.
Freight is separate and depends on where the boxes land. We deliver to the UK, the USA and Europe and invoice in seven currencies, so a band paying from a sterling account is not absorbing a conversion on top of the shirts. If you want the print in your hands before the run goes ahead, a sample is £150 and is credited against the bulk order.
How should the table price be set against cost?
Work from landed cost rather than from the from-price. Landed cost is the garment, the decoration, the freight and your share of any duty, divided by the pieces you realistically expect to sell rather than the pieces you bought. A run where a fifth goes home in the van has a very different real cost per sale than the invoice implies.
That single adjustment changes most merch decisions. It is why ordering deeper on a proven graphic usually beats spreading the same budget across three untested ones, and why a size curve weighted to what your crowd actually wears is worth more than an extra fifty pieces. The pieces you never sell are paid for out of the margin on the ones you do.
