Two Ways to Put Your Brand on a Shirt
Screen printing and direct-to-garment (DTG) are the two main ways to put a design on custom apparel, and picking the wrong one wastes money and ends up with gear nobody wears. 295 Guys has done screen printing in San Diego since 1987, and we work with both methods, so we have no reason to push you toward one. This breakdown is how we actually advise clients: match the method to the garment, the design, and the quantity.
Get those three inputs right and the decision makes itself. Get them wrong and you pay for it in cracked prints or a per-shirt price that didn’t have to be that high. Here’s how each method works and where it belongs.
Screen Printing: The Workhorse
Screen printing pushes ink through a stencil — one screen per color — onto the shirt, then cures it with heat. Plastisol ink, the industry standard, has to reach roughly 320°F to cure properly, which is what makes a correctly printed shirt hold up wash after wash. According to industry guidance from ScreenPrinting.com, under-curing is the most common reason prints crack and peel — which is exactly the cheap-shop failure that gives custom shirts a bad name.
Screen printing is the best value for quantity. Once the screens are made, each additional shirt is cheap, so a run of 100 event tees costs far less per shirt than a run of 10. It’s ideal for bold designs with a handful of colors. The trade-off is setup: every color needs its own screen, so a 6-color photo-realistic image gets expensive and impractical. For most San Diego event, brewery, and team orders, this is the method.
DTG: Detail and Small Runs
Direct-to-garment printing works like an inkjet printer for fabric — it sprays the design straight onto the shirt. That makes it strong where screen printing struggles: full-color, highly detailed, or photographic artwork, and small quantities where screen setup isn’t worth it. Need five shirts with a complex gradient? DTG handles it without per-color screens.
The catch is durability and cost at scale. DTG prints sit on the surface and generally don’t last as long as a properly cured screen print, and the per-shirt price doesn’t drop much with volume the way screen printing does. DTG is a precision tool for the right job — short runs and intricate art — not the default for a big order.
How to Choose for Your San Diego Business
Strip away the jargon and the decision comes down to three questions. What’s the garment? What’s the design? How many do you need?
- Bold design, soft tee, decent quantity: screen printing. Best durability and the lowest per-shirt cost at volume.
- Photo-real or detailed art, small run: DTG. Full color with no per-color setup.
- Not sure where your job lands: tell us the garment, the art, and the quantity, and we’ll point you to the method that gets the best result for the money.
Some orders even use both — screen print the high-volume event tees, and run the detailed, small-batch pieces on DTG. The goal is one consistent brand across everything you hand out.
Why the Method Matters for Durability
How long your gear lasts is mostly a function of method and execution. The textile industry measures wash durability with standardized laundering tests, like the colorfastness methods published by the American Association of Textile Chemists and Colorists, and the gap between a well-made print and a cheap one shows up fast under that kind of repeated washing.
This is where shop quality separates from price. A properly cured screen print lasts for years; an under-cured print fails in weeks. It’s also why we send a sample before every full run — you approve the real, washed-and-worn quality instead of trusting a screen mockup. You can request one through our free sample program.
Quality You Can Actually See
Method choice sets the ceiling; craftsmanship decides whether you hit it. The same design can come out as a collectible or a car-wash rag depending on ink, mesh, cure, and the person running the press. Branded apparel is worth doing well precisely because people keep and wear the good stuff — and toss the bad.
You can see the difference in finished work in our gallery of brand transformations, and the same care extends to where a design sits on the garment, which we cover on our print placement guide. For the practical questions that come up on every order — minimums, files, turnaround — our rundown of common printing questions covers the basics.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is cheaper, screen printing or DTG?
For larger quantities, screen printing is cheaper per shirt because the cost drops as the run grows. For very small runs or highly detailed art, DTG often wins since there’s no per-color screen setup. Tell us your quantity and design and we’ll tell you which is more economical.
Does DTG or screen printing last longer?
A properly cured screen print generally outlasts DTG, because the ink is cured into the fabric rather than sitting on the surface. For gear that gets washed constantly, screen printing is the more durable choice.
How long does a custom order take in San Diego?
Turnaround depends on the method, quantity, and garment availability. Give us your in-hand date when you request a quote and we’ll confirm whether it’s workable and what it takes to hit it.
Can I combine screen printing and DTG in one order?
Yes. Screen print the high-volume pieces and run the detailed, small-batch items on DTG, and we’ll keep one consistent brand across the whole order.
Ready to Get Started?
Tell us the garment, the design, and the quantity, and we’ll tell you straight which method gets you the best result for the money — no upsell, just the right tool for your job.
Request a Quote or call us at 858-513-7000.