T-Shirt Manufacturer
FashionMe's Stock Match route starts from a T-shirt a factory already has in production and ships orders from 10 pieces in 7–10 days. For a shirt built to your own pattern, fabric, collar and print, use Made to Order. It needs at least 50 pieces per style. After 7–12 days of sampling and your approval, production takes 15–20 days.
A run of 300–500 Made to Order T-shirts costs $3.50–6.00 a piece after an $80–150 charge for the pattern and sample.
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Stock Match or Made to Order
Stock Match
- Starting point
- An in-production factory style
- Minimum
- 10 pieces per order
- Lead time
- 7–10 days
- Fabrics and fits
- 180–240 gsm combed cotton in classic, oversized boxy, cropped and heavyweight fits
- Branding
- Swapping the factory's labels for your own woven or printed ones costs $0.35 a piece and needs at least 50 pieces per style. Hang tags are $0.25 each and branded polybags, mailers or boxes $0.45. Screen and direct-to-film (DTF) printing are quoted per piece.
- Sample
- Order one piece through your quote before you commit
- Inspection
- A sample pulled from each order is checked as standard unless you pay $0.18 a piece to have every piece checked.
- Cost
- Supplier price plus a sourcing fee of 12% of the supplier invoice under $5,000, 9% up to $20,000 and 7% up to $50,000. From $50,000 the fee is 5% on a custom quote.
Made to Order
- Starting point
- Your measurements, tech pack, sketch, photo or physical reference garment
- Minimum
- 50 pieces per style, shared across colorways as your quote states
- Lead time
- 7–12 days of sampling, then 15–20 days of production
- Fabrics
- 160–280 gsm in carded, combed or ring-spun cotton, cotton-poly or tri-blend
- Branding
- Branded packaging is included, as are custom neck labels put in during production.
- Inspection
- Every piece
- Cost
- $80–150 for the pattern and sample, then $3.50–6.00 a piece at 300–500 pieces and less from 1,000
- Reorders
- Reorder the approved T-shirt body in the same or new colors and graphics
Every order on either route comes with a Launch Kit of five listing images, one creative image and a video of about 10 seconds.
How each point is measured
Because a 100% inspection checks each piece against your spec sheet before it leaves the factory, every point on that sheet needs a measuring method and a tolerance.
| Point | How it is measured | Tolerance |
|---|---|---|
| Body length | From the high point shoulder (HPS), where the shoulder seam meets the collar, straight down to the hem | ±0.5 in (1.3 cm) |
| Chest | Straight across the front, edge to edge, 1 in (2.5 cm) below the armhole | ±0.5 in (1.3 cm) laid flat (±1 in, 2.5 cm, around the full chest) |
| Shoulder | Straight across, from the outer end of one shoulder seam to the outer end of the other | ±0.25 in (0.6 cm) |
| Sleeve length | From the shoulder seam to the sleeve hem | ±0.25 in (0.6 cm) |
| Sleeve opening | The full circumference of the opening | ±0.25 in (0.6 cm) |
| Armhole | The full circumference of the armhole | ±0.25 in (0.6 cm) |
| Neck width | Seam to seam across the neck opening | ±0.15 in (0.4 cm) |
| Front neck drop | From a line joining the two high points down to the top edge of the front neck | ±0.15 in (0.4 cm) |
| Collar height | Depth of the finished collar band, which the Indian police specification sets at 1 in (2.5 cm) | Not set in that specification |
The tolerances, the collar height and the methods for shoulder, sleeve opening and armhole come from a round-neck T-shirt specification for India's central armed police forces, published on the Ministry of Home Affairs website. The other methods follow the vendor guides of QVC Italia and Orvis and FashionMe's size table.
Fabric spec
Converted to the ounces per square yard used in US blank catalogs, the 160–280 gsm range of Made to Order fabrics is 4.7–8.3 oz. Divide gsm by 33.9 to get ounces.
Colony Brands spells out the fabric limits it expects from suppliers in its vendor manual. A knit must not shrink more than 6% in length or width after three home washes (AATCC 135). The manual also limits twist to 5% of garment length (AATCC 179) and holds fabric weight to within 10% of the specification.
| Cotton yarn | What it means |
|---|---|
| Carded | Carding cleans trash, short fibers and neps (small fiber tangles) out of the cotton. |
| Combed | Combing does the same cleaning and also lines up the remaining fibers in parallel. |
| Ring-spun | Ring spinning costs more than open-end spinning and gives a stronger, softer and less even yarn in a wider range of counts. |
Yarn definitions from Cotton Incorporated's bulletin on cotton spun yarns.
The crew-neck collar
On a Made to Order T-shirt the collar is a band of rib knit whose construction, finished height, elastane content and taping all belong on your spec. The wider ribs of a 2x2 make a fuller collar that stretches less than a finer 1x1.
| Published blank | Weight and yarn | Collar | Neck finish |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gildan 5000 | 5.3 oz (180 gsm), 20-singles cotton | 7/8 in (2.2 cm) rib | Neck and shoulders taped |
| Shaka Wear Max Heavyweight | 7.5 oz (245–255 gsm), 16-singles cotton | 1 in (2.5 cm) rib with elastane (Lycra) | Shoulder-to-shoulder tape, double-needle stitched neck |
A higher yarn count means a finer yarn, so the 16-singles Shaka Wear tee is knit from coarser yarn than the 20-singles Gildan. The Indian armed police specification joins its collar rib with a four-thread overlock (stitch type 514) and topstitches it with a double-needle 406 coverstitch at a 4 mm gauge.
Decoration and print placement
In Made to Order the print or embroidery is developed alongside the sample. Production does not start until you have approved it. For each print, the tech pack should give its width and height, how far below the collar it sits and how far it is offset from center front.
| Placement | Print size | Position |
|---|---|---|
| Full front | 11 × 11 in (28 × 28 cm) | 3 in (7.6 cm) below the collar |
| Left chest | 3.5 × 2 in (8.9 × 5.1 cm) | 2.5–3 in (6.4–7.6 cm) from the collar down to the center of the print. 3.5–4 in (8.9–10.2 cm) from center front. |
Standard placements from ScreenPrinting.com's placement guide.
| Method | What to know |
|---|---|
| Screen printing | Each color in the design needs its own screen. Plastisol ink leaves a thicker hand on the fabric than water-based ink. |
| DTF | Prints on cotton, polyester, fleece, nylon and blends. The print feels slightly stiff at first and may develop small cracks if the shirt is washed in very hot water. |
| Embroidery | Lettering should be at least 0.25 in (0.6 cm) tall. Gradients and halftones cannot be stitched. |
Garment-dyed T-shirts
A garment-dyed T-shirt goes into the dye after it has been sewn. Cotton Incorporated's bulletin on garment dyeing says the knit fabric is pre-relaxed first to limit twist, puckered seams and shrinkage. Cutting the garments oversized also allows for shrinkage, though the bulletin warns it may spoil seam appearance.
Garment washing is used for a faded, vintage or softened finish. Approve a sample that has been through the same dye or wash as production. If a shirt has been dyed over an earlier color, discharge ink usually has no effect on it or leaves an uneven result.
Inspection
In one FashionMe case study, a streetwear label selling over 5,000 pieces a season was finding defects in more than 4% of the goods that reached the US. Most were misregistered prints. Under the 100% inspection FashionMe added at the factory, every piece was checked for print registration and stitch quality against the approved sample. Over the next three production runs the defect rate fell to 0.4%. The case study puts the fall in returns at 71%.
When only a sample of the goods is inspected, the result is judged against an acceptable quality limit (AQL). Common settings are 0 for critical defects, 2.5 for major and 4.0 for minor. For a 4,000-piece lot at General Inspection Level II, the inspector pulls 200 pieces and passes the lot if no more than 10 of them have a major defect.
Shipping time and import duty
| Mode | To the US | To Germany |
|---|---|---|
| Express courier | 3–6 days | 2–6 days |
| Air freight | 6–10 days | 8–12 days |
| Sea, full container | 18–30 days to the West Coast, 30–45 days to the East Coast | 33–45 days |
| Sea, shared container | 25–40 days to the West Coast | 38–50 days |
| Rail | Not available | 16–24 days |
Door-to-door times from China, published in June 2026 by Epic Sourcing for the US and by ExFreight for Germany. Epic Sourcing gives its express and air times to the West Coast.
| Route and freight | Days to the US West Coast |
|---|---|
| Made to Order, air | 28–42 |
| Made to Order, sea in a full container | 40–62 |
| Made to Order, sea in a shared container | 47–72 |
| Stock Match, express | 10–16 |
Each total adds the route's lead time to the door-to-door freight time. The sample's courier trip to you and the time you take to approve it are not included.
| Market | Goods from China | Duty, October 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| US | Cotton T-shirts (HTS 6109.10.00) | 36.5% |
| US | T-shirts of man-made fibers such as polyester (HTS 6109.90.10) | 52% |
| EU | Cotton T-shirts (6109 10 00) | 12% |
Cotton T-shirts from China have paid an extra 12.5% under Section 301 heading 9903.05.31 since July 24, 2026. Added to the 16.5% general rate and a 7.5% Section 301 duty under heading 9903.88.15, that brings the total to 36.5%. FashionMe bills freight and duty at cost. On a shirt invoiced at $3.50–6.00, the duty alone is $1.28–2.19. Cotton-poly and tri-blend shirts are classified as whichever fiber weighs the most.
Since May 2, 2025, goods from China have not qualified for the $800 de minimis exemption, so express parcels pay duty too. The exemption was suspended for all other countries on August 29, 2025.
Request a T-shirt quote
Upload up to six files, whether that is a photo of a reference garment, a video, a sketch or a full tech pack. Within 24 hours you get a tiered quote that prices each route with its own minimum and lead time.
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