For bands · from a fan

Getting it made well, and paying people properly.

The store is the easy half. The money and the harm both live upstream, in who prints the shirt and who made the blank. This is what we could find out, with the numbers in the open.

What a shirt actually leaves you

The biggest lever on a band’s merch income isn’t the platform fee. It’s how the thing was made. Move the numbers:

Two things fall out of that table. Printing a run beats print-on-demand by roughly double per shirt, and the gap only widens as the run grows: that is the single largest change most bands can make. And the ethical blank costs you a few dollars a shirt, not a business. At thirty dollars retail it is the difference between keeping about seventeen and keeping about thirteen, on a garment somebody was paid properly to make.

The honest caveat. A run is cash up front and boxes in a closet, and unsold shirts are worse than a thin margin. The usual answer: print on demand until a design proves itself, then print that design in a run. Take the pre-orders first and let the fans fund the run.

Choosing a printer

Local beats remote for anything you’ll reorder: you can hold a sample, and a misprint gets sorted in a day. Ask these before you pay, and ask them in writing.

• What’s the all-in price for my run, including the blanks, every ink colour, both placements, setup, and delivery? A quote without setup and shipping isn’t a quote.
• What’s the setup fee per screen, and does it carry over on a reorder? Most shops keep your screens for a while; if yours does, the second run is cheaper and you should know by how much.
• Which blank, exactly? Brand and style number, not “a nice soft tee”. It decides the fit, the feel, the price and who made it.
• Can I see a physical sample of that blank in that colour before the run?
• What happens to misprints? A shop that prints 50 will make a few. Ask whether they overrun to cover it, or credit you, and get the answer before it matters.
• What’s the real turnaround, from art approved to boxes in my hand, and what makes it slip? If you need them for a tour, say the date of the first show, not the date you want them.
• What file do you want? Vector art (.ai, .svg, .pdf) at full size, one layer per ink colour. Sending a screenshot of a logo is the most common reason a job looks bad.
• How many colours am I paying for? Every extra colour is another screen, another setup, and another dollar or two a shirt. A one-colour design on a coloured blank often looks better and costs half.

Being decent to the chain

Two different sets of hands: whoever sewed the blank, and whoever printed it. They are almost never the same company, and a printer down the road can still be printing on a garment made badly.

The blank

Ask your printer to quote a Continental or Stanley/Stella garment alongside the standard one. Both are Fair Wear Foundation members, which means their factories are audited and the findings are published rather than asserted. Compare the two quotes and decide with the number in front of you.

The printing

Union shops exist and will put a union bug on the shirt: Ethix Merch, The Gloo Factory, Worx Printing (a worker-owned co-op that also does print on demand). Ask your local shop what their printers are paid; a good one answers.

Certifications, plainly

Fair Wear is about the people who sewed it. GOTS is about organic fibre and includes some labour criteria. OEKO-TEX is about chemicals in the fabric, not working conditions. They aren’t interchangeable and a brand will happily let you conflate them.

Water-based ink

Softer on the shirt, no plastic layer, and better for the people breathing the air in the shop. Costs a little more and needs a printer who’s good at it. Worth asking for.

What to say publicly

If you paid for the better blank, put the brand and the certification on the product page. If you didn’t, don’t imply you did. Fans forgive a standard shirt; they don’t forgive being told a story.

Records

Vinyl is a different shape of problem: the money is fine, the waiting is brutal. A 300-copy run lands around $7.50 to $9 a record all-in for standard black, with a colour variant adding roughly $0.50 to $1.50 and a gatefold sleeve $1.50 to $3. Sold at $28 to $32, that is the healthiest margin on the whole merch table.

The catch is lead time: six to nine months at most US plants in 2026, occasionally eight weeks at a smaller shop with a gap in its schedule. Plan the release around the plant, not the other way round, and take pre-orders the day you place the order. A pre-order with a real ship date on the page is not a broken promise; a pre-order with no date is.

Cassettes are the opposite trade: a few dollars a unit, a few weeks, and a small but real audience. Good for a tour you booked last month.

A few things that quietly cost bands money

• Ordering the size curve by guess. Look at what actually sold last time. Most bands over-order small and run out of XL and 2XL, then lose the sale and the fan.
• Charging the same for 2XL and up when the blank costs more. Either price it up by the real difference or absorb it deliberately. Don’t discover it at the end of the run.
• Paying for four ink colours on a design that reads in one. Look at the shirts you actually wear.
• Shipping at a loss. Weigh a packed shirt and a packed record once, then price postage from the real number. Pirate Ship is free and sells USPS at commercial rates.
• Leaving the merch table money off the books. Cash at shows is most of the income for a lot of bands; a card reader from Stripe or Square puts it in the same account as the store and saves an evening of arithmetic.

The storeWhat a store costsThe one-hour checklist

Written by a fan, not a supplier.No affiliate links; nobody here is paid to name anyone.Printing and pressing figures are mid-range trade quotes gathered 26 Sep 2026 and move with cotton, ink and plant capacity: treat them as a starting point for your own quotes, not a price.