Side-Seamed Construction

Cut a shirt from a tube of knit fabric and there's no seam running up the sides at all; sew it instead from two flat panels, front and back, stitched together at the sides, and you get side-seamed construction. Gildan's 5000 and 2000, both knit tubular to save a sewing step, are the classic contrast — no side seam, a boxier silhouette, and a slightly looser drape through the torso.

Retail-style blanks like Next Level's 3600 and Bella+Canvas's 3001 are side-seamed instead, which lets the pattern taper in at the waist and shape the body the way a store-bought fashion tee does rather than hanging like a straight tube. We point first-time apparel brands toward side-seamed blanks specifically when they tell us they want their shirt to look like it came off a retail rack, not a print shop.

The extra seam adds a sewing step and a few cents of cost per shirt, which is exactly why it shows up on the higher end of most blank catalogs rather than the bargain tees. It's worth checking for on a spec sheet if the goal is a slimmer, more tailored fit — a tubular tee in the same size chart will run boxier through the sides even at an identical chest measurement.

Buyers assume side-seamed tees run smaller because they look more fitted, but the chest measurement is usually identical to a tubular blank in the same size — the fit looks slimmer because of the shaping at the side seam, not because the actual dimensions shrank.