Customer-supplied garments

Customer-supplied garments means the buyer sources the blanks — from a wholesaler, a retail store, or existing stock — and ships or hands them to the shop for decoration only. Most shops charge a surcharge for this, commonly $0.50-$2 per piece on top of the standard print price, to cover extra handling, inventory tracking, and the risk of working with goods they didn't stock or inspect.

This comes up constantly with vintage tees, discontinued colors a brand can't reorder, or a client who bought a case of blanks from a big-box store at a price no wholesale account could match. We've turned down jobs on thin, cheap import blanks because a heat press or a flash cure can scorch fabric the shop has never worked with before, and no shop wants that liability on a stranger's shirt.

Ask upfront whether a shop even accepts customer-supplied garments — plenty don't, or only above a certain quantity. Get the misprint policy in writing: most shops will only replace the print, not the garment, if something goes wrong on goods they didn't sell.

The mistake buyers make: assuming the job is automatically cheaper because they skipped buying the blank through the shop. Between the surcharge and the lost buying power of a case-quantity discount, the shop's own inventory is often the better deal unless the garment itself is unavailable any other way.