Screen Printing vs Embroidery on T-Shirts
By The Velocity Wear Team
Screen printing puts ink on the surface and is priced per colour, so it rewards flat artwork and larger runs. Embroidery stitches thread into the fabric and is priced by stitch count, so it rewards small, simple marks and is indifferent to quantity. On a 150 to 240 GSM cotton tee, print for graphics and embroider for logos is the rule that holds most of the time.
How do the two processes differ?
Screen printing separates your artwork into colours, burns one screen per colour, and pushes ink through each in turn. That makes a four-colour design four passes and four setups. Embroidery digitises the artwork into a stitch path and a machine sews it into the garment, so cost tracks how many stitches the design needs rather than how many colours it contains. The outcomes feel completely different in the hand: a print is flat and part of the fabric surface, embroidery is raised and has weight. Both are listed on our wholesale t-shirts page, and the comparison pages set the methods side by side.
What does each cost at 50 pieces and at 500?
At the 50-piece minimum, screen printing is at its least efficient because the screen setup is spread across only 50 shirts. A one-colour chest print is still inexpensive; a four-colour front at 50 is where buyers get a surprise. At 500 the same four-colour front is very economical, because the setup has not changed and the run has grown tenfold. Embroidery behaves differently: a small chest logo is priced similarly per piece at 50 and at 500, because the machine sews the same stitches either way. Across both methods the garment itself still steps down through the tiers, up to 35% off the 50-piece price.
Which one lasts longer?
Embroidery, in practice, because thread has nothing to crack. A properly cured screen print will outlast normal wear too, but daily hot washing eventually dulls and breaks up any ink film, and the heavier the ink deposit the more noticeable that becomes. This is why hospitality and gym uniform, which is washed constantly, so often ends up embroidered, and why event and retail tees, which are washed occasionally, are almost always printed.
Which artwork suits each?
Screen printing handles flat colour, bold shapes, fine line detail and text down to a small size, but struggles with photographs and gradients. Embroidery handles solid shapes and confident type, but closes up on anything under about 5mm tall and cannot reproduce a gradient at all. A logo with a thin strapline usually needs the strapline printed or removed. If the design has more than about five colours, screen printing is no longer the sensible route and DTF against screen printing is the comparison to read next.
Pick screen printing when, pick embroidery when
Pick screen printing when the design is large, when it has one to four flat colours, when you are buying 250 pieces or more, when the tee is being sold or given away, and when the graphic is the point of the shirt. Pick embroidery when the mark is small and sits on the chest, when the shirt is uniform that gets washed hot every day, when you want the garment to feel considered rather than promotional, and when quantity is close to the 50-piece minimum so a multi-colour setup would dominate the price. All five decoration methods covers the options beyond these two.
Does position change which method to use?
It does. A left chest mark suits either, and embroidery reads better there because the raised stitch catches light on a small area. A full front is print territory, since embroidering a large area is slow, heavy on the garment and expensive in stitches. Backs follow the same logic. Sleeves and the nape are small enough for embroidery to make sense and small enough that a screen setup is hard to justify unless it shares a colour with a print elsewhere on the shirt. Each additional position is another pass through production whichever method you choose.
