The Official GetYourShirts Blog

Customers have been asking for quite some time about single t-shirt orders. Thanks to digital printing, we can now fill those requests! What makes these t-shirt different from our other screen printed t-shirts? A lot of things are different! Depending on your preferences, some are good, others not so good:

With this new process the turnaround is much quicker, at least half the time of screen printed shirts. We want to decrease the turnaround time until we are printing and shipping in 24 hours (It’s one of our New Year’s Resolutions).

In comparison to screen printing, digital printing costs much less when ordering less than 10 shirts. Of course, we are always looking for ways to save our customers as much money as possible. With digital printing, we can also achieve a higher level of detail than with screen printing. This is great because we can now produce more complex designs!

As is in our screen printed shirts, the colors look great in digitally printed shirts. But, place the two side-by-side, one will look better than the other. These two processes differ so greatly from each other that getting identical results is impossible. The texture of a digital printed shirt is smoother and flatter than that of a screen printed shirt. This can be good or bad. When we print on white or very light shirts, we cannot use an under-base. This leaves the print sinking into the garment a bit. Its not a major issue, though.

Samples were sent out to customers to find out what people thought of the new process. Customers received a screen printed t-shirt and a digital printed t-shirt of the same design. This was done, primarily, to answer the question: “Is it as good as screen printing?” Most people liked the digital print, but felt it was not quite as good as screen printing. Less than 10% felt the digital print was bad.

Some ink colors cannot be reproduced: glow-in-the-dark, metallic inks, suede texture, fluorescent inks. For now, the online ordering system is not aware of this limitation. Don’t worry, we are working on fixing this issue. We will call you if there is a concern. Also, digital prints do not launder as well as screen printing. Washing and drying your shirt with hot water and high heat with rough texture cloths, like jeans, will tear up the image a bit. Doing that multiple times will result in the print looking horribly peeled after about 10 washings.

We are happy with being able to offer something that comes this close to screen printing. As technology improves, we hope to get the process so perfect no one can tell the difference.

To ramp up production we are limiting the single t-shirt orders to S110 (100% cotton t-shirts only).

You want to order? Make your design, and then click the ‘order t-shirts with this design’. Click the left hand ‘pick garment sizes’ button. Prices are $18.95 for a one-sided print and 26.95 for a two-sided print. Both come with unlimited ink colors. Shipping is free if you order over $50.

Hello, We are in our slow time for the next few weeks. We are working on lots of new designs for the site. I will highlight some of the new ones as they go live. If you have any ideas or requests please tell us and we will add them to the list!

Summer was an amazing time for us! It was crazy, there were boxes all over the place and we were dashing to Fedex late at night to get the orders out on time! Things were so busy, its kind of nice to have it slow down to normal again. (Blogging also dropped off due the busy time)

We are very sorry that we had to scale back 6 day rush and 9 day priority service during the busy season. Faster turnaround could have helped many of our customers out of a bad situation. We know you cannot control the stragglers that wait till the last minute :(

To address the busy time for this fall and next summer, we are adding a lot more capacity. Enough to cover the increase in business we had this summer. Plus a little more :) We are hoping that we can even cut back our standard turnaround by a day. We will know after this fall if we can pull it off.

Customers receiving orders in the past few days will notice a small change to the t-shirts. The line identifying the manufacturer (us) now has a /12345 after it. The new text reads GetYourShirts.com/12345. The 12345 is the work order number. “What’s this?” you ask. :)

According to CPSIA, all products that can potentially be used by a child (12 yrs or younger) need to have manufacturer information and include testing information. We are including the URL to allow any end user of the t-shirts to see the required testing information. When you get your t-shirts, just type in that url and all the relevant testing data will be displayed. Cool, huh? This new law effects all screen printers of t-shirts that carry sizes that a 12 year old or younger might wear. (In other words, adult medium or smaller.)

This is starting with orders taken on August 1st to comply with the CPSIA deadline of August 14th. We had wanted to start even earlier but we were still working on the inside part of it. All data going back thru 2009 was added to the system. We made it with just a few days leeway, whew!

The great thing is that this system will later support any other CPSIA requirements for screen printed t-shirts.

We will be adding the url to ALL orders to protect you, the purchaser, the end recipients of the t-shirt’s and ourselves as the manufacturer. We feel its important to test products and make those test results public. The CPSIA is doing a great thing protecting all of us. Lead poisoning is not fun!

I am sure this will come up: Some people may not want the labeling on your t-shirts. It is a federal requirement, regardless of whether you are certain that a 12 year old will never wear the t-shirt. In the event that one does end up on a child, this labeling is the best thing to protect yourself and give peace of mind to the people that wear the garments. It says you care about the people you are giving the shirt too. The only option we have to not have it on the design itself is to print it on the inside of the shirt as a supplemental label. This option would cost more (the same price as a second location) and, in our opinion, is not worth the extra money. The URL printed as part of the design is free. :)

The eight weeks leading up to July 4th is typically a busy time for us and this year did not fall short. In fact, we’ve beaten all of our past records for orders in-house. The last three weeks are our #1, #2, and #3 weeks of all time.

This is exciting for us, particularly because so many of our orders are from long-time customers. It makes us feel good to know we’ve done a good job for you in the past, and that you’ve trusted us once again with your order.

This explosion in business makes us a little worried, though. At the beginning of the year, with the economic conditions as they were, we did not hire as many people nor upgrade our equipment like we normally would. We didn’t know how the economy would affect our industry, our customers, and our business. We braced for the worst and, by playing it safe, we have created a new problem.

While we are doing everything we can to keep up with business and provide excellent service to each and every customer, we know we could be doing better. Even with most of us coming in early each day, staying late most nights, and working on the weekends, it simply hasn’t been enough. We’ve read your surveys and emails and we know that we aren’t doing as good a job as normal of keeping you informed about the status of your order. We’re shipping your orders out faster than normal to reach deadlines and, for a few orders this summer, we haven’t met your deadlines. For that we are truly sorry.

Even our online t-shirt designer was affected. We simply never tested it under the kind of traffic it has been receiving and it turned out there was a bottleneck that caused it to break when there were too many people designing t-shirts at the same time. That’s fixed now, and we’re planning more upgrades to speed it up.

Please know that we are adding more staff every week and training people as quickly as we can to accommodate the increased business. We’re not accepting rush or priority orders until we are back on our normal schedule. We are also planning on equipment upgrades to do a better job during our next busy season.

We view this as an opportunity and we’ll spare no expense to increase our capacity as quickly as possible. We are working hard to continue to earn your loyalty and trust.

We started making swatch cards while back. Why? Many people want a true representation of the color of the t-shirt. Everyone knows what Red is, but not many can tell the color of Avocado. So we came up with a clever way of showing the color of the shirt. We take business cards with the product info and attach little tiny t-shirt cut outs of the color. We originally were going to print the info on the tiny shirt shaped pieces, but any tiny crookedness or twist looked horrible. We did have lots of fun with trying how to print the small T-shirts. Can you spot one thats not crooked?

Well we ended up with sticking it on a business card.

To get them, you register on the site and then you can get up to 4 swatches. Why not more? The little things cost a lot to make and the cost for a full set of all colors is around $31 - ouch! So we figure we can give them away for free, as long as we keep the total amount we send out reasonable.

We think these will help people who are unsure which color to pick or are trying to match an existing color. A computer image or photo of shirt fabric just does not do the same thing.

While we were working on the Eco-T program, we came across a cool gadget for measuring power consumption. A thought came to mind as the breaker tripped for the 100th time, how much power do the computers actually use? I bought one of these:

Its a Kill-a-watt, an energy use measuring tool. We plugged it into some of our computers and measured how much energy they use. We made some interesting discoveries that have led to some very significant changes in our energy consumption.

We have a variety of computers here, some older G5 Power Macs, many Mac Minis and the newest computers are intel iMacs and Mac Pros. The average power consumption at very low load of an older G5 Powermac tower, both sans monitor was 6x the power usage of a Mac mini! As far as power cost goes, that a yearly $165 vs $29. One of the G5 Powermacs was a quad processor, a water cooled monster that was our old server. It has a $389 yearly cost to operate! The iMacs with monitors come in at $115 per year. LCD Monitors cost $60-110 to operate per year depending on size and make.

Our computers have to be on all the time, so sleep was not an option since the connection to the server would be severed in a bad way. So we looked into having the server connections sleep before the computers sleep. We installed a script that achieved this and set the majority of the stores computers to sleep when the store is closed. This should shave off 60-70% of our energy consumption. The difference between a G5 Powermac and a intel Mac Mini was so dramatic that we decided to retire 4 of the older towers and replace them. We sold them on eBay for even out dollars for the minis but will cut power usage to 18% of the original usage!

We have one PC in the store that we measured, an Alienware. OMG, it was just as bad as the Quad G5, $345 a year. We will stick with mac minis whenever possible.

I love these little computers, they are the best! I cannot wait for the next revision, we are going to replace 5 of our older PowerMacs.

We have about 30 Macs at the office and the overall savings in power usage is huge, all of this just by taking a little time and looking at how we can reduce our impact. We saved money and electricity! By the way, the mac minis are faster than the G5 Powermac towers, a total win, no matter how you look at it. Now that we know how much a computer can use in power over its lifetime, we will take that into consideration when choosing our upgrades.

If you’re thinking about buying a Kill-a-watt, there’s a small design flaw we noticed. It needs a small extension cord to be able to twist and see the readout. We picked some up at Target and they worked great.

Presenting care tags with an artistic flair! Why care tags? Because not everyone knows the proper way to care for their new t-shirt. To bleach or not to bleach? It’s a real brain stumper sometimes. And forget about dryer settings. Who really knows what permanent press is really doing in the dryer? Seems like a big rolling bin of heat with no pressing to me, but anyway.

Now there is no question, all the do’s and don’ts are right on the tag! Each care tag is randomly selected from the eight different designs. It is then cachuncked right on the manufacturer’s t-shirt tag, in the back of the shirt. No pesky holes in your garment. We have seen retailers pick the worst placement for care tags and brand labeling. Nobody wants a big chacunck hole in their sleeve. No body cares about a pinhole in the tag as it’s never seen. :)

You’re probably asking yourself right now, what’s a cachunk? That’s what I call the machine used to attach the tag to the shirt. There is a proper name for the cachunker, but it has slipped my mind. See photo. ;)

Everyone loves the designs which are all unique in their own way. The art department’s imagination ran wild and made this project an overwhelming success. We could hardly wait for them to be delivered. It seemed like everyday someone was asking if they were here yet? This project leaves everyone asking what we will come up with next. :)

Here are some pics of the new care tags:

And the venerable cachunker:

We are going to be coming out with a retail line of shirts soon. One of the coolest looks is the odd location prints. When you combine that with an unusual shirt, the result is amazing. While I was dealing with the latest font problem, I decided to do my own design to test the shoulder prints. It’s rare that I ever do a T-shirt design. I am really not very good at it, the people in the GetYourShirts art department make me look like a chimpanzee with a crayon. But, I have to say, this design came out pretty good. I tried to combine the look of Japanese Fish prints, called Gyotako and some of my favorites.

The design took me about 3 hours, I had to do the sargassum element by hand.

We put the design in a fine mesh screen and picked out some cool shirts to try out. The designs printed exactly like I had hoped. The quality was perfect. We did the printing on a Saturday, so if it needed the screen redone, we would have been out of luck. We printed all the side prints first and they were easier than I thought they would be. The designs fell exactly where we wanted, within a half inch. The shoulder prints were a bit harder. We experimented with a variety of methods to get the print to fall correctly but the shirt size and the angle of the design made it very unpredictable. Although even the ones that fell wrong still looked awesome. The distressing that occurred when the design hit the seams or the collar was beautiful, I had always wondered what the trick was, but we kind of found it out accidentally during one of the attempts. We will be offering these unusual print locations soon. The bottom hem will probably not cost more, but the shoulder will definitely be a extra charge, it takes about 3-4x longer to produce.

The shoulder and hem prints will be a part of our upcoming retail line.

Here are some shots:

We use a small price of squeegee material to clean the ink off of screens once the printing is done. It has always been a job people do not like.

It is necessary for a variety of reasons:

1. otherwise the ink goes into a landfill

2. we can reuse the recovered ink

3. recovery of ink is cost effective

I had the idea that of the shelf spatulas would be more effective than the little 1×1 cube of squeegee. So i went to target and bought some:

I lost the photos :(

Although the knife one is very cool and i now use it at home. The experiment was a total failure. The spatulas are all to soft and in some cases the ink bonds to the plastic and it becomes stained. Those spatulas I thru away - kind of disappointing.

We did decide a larger 2×1 peice of squeegee would be better, so not all was a waste.