Starting an online t-shirt business

starting an online t-shirt business 2023

Before we rush into setting up a Shopify store for your ecommerce needs (our personal recommendation), we think it’s important to make sure you’re making the right business decisions when starting an online t-shirt business to save you money, time and wasted effort.

Here are 7 tips you wish you knew before starting an online t-shirt business.

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26 of the best T-Shirt label Designs

26 inside t-shirt tags creative design examples

Hit a dead end? Looking for the perfect inspiration for your next t-shirt tag design?

Finding the right inside t-shirt tag design is challenging. Not only is the inside tag designed to give your customer the essential information, it’s also an attention to detail that reflects who you are as a brand.

To get you inspired or help you get over your annoying “designer’s block,” we have carefully curated a list of 26 outstanding t-shirt sizing and care tags. If you are looking for pre-made t-shirt tags, check out this download. Continue reading 26 of the best T-Shirt label Designs

Custom printed clothing size tags.

Inside tag printing low down legal requirements tag templates

Legal requirements, artwork templates & more.

This is where clothing brands really set themselves apart from one another – in their attention to details. Most clothing companies will stand for something, whether that’s mass manufacturing, bespoke creations, limited editions, high end design or specific genre graphics, whatever it is, you can generally tell what kind of label it is by what kind of clothing size tags they use.

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Color Blocking a Vector Clothing Mockup

color blocking vector clothing mockup illustrator TMB

We were recently asked by a customer.

“I’m using your Master Collection Pack and I can’t work out how to make the bottom half of a t-shirt a different colour to the top half. So for example, the bottom half camo and the top half black. Can you help?”

Our support team quickly swung into action to explain how to create a half/half color blocking panel for the t-shirt design.

We thought this would be a great opportunity to show everyone how to simulate color panels for any of our vector mockup templates.

Let’s dive in!

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21 Must Have Handmade Fonts

21 must have handmade fonts TMB

If you’re time poor but still need to inject some handmade typography into your design work, then having an assortment of well engineered handmade fonts at your disposal is a must. We believe there is nothing better than creating a full graphic design by hand, but if you must use preset fonts, here is a list of 21 must have handmade fonts for your design toolkit which we think are the best in class. Let us know which font is your favourite in the comments section below.
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Creating an Underbase in Adobe Illustrator – Screen Printing 101

creating an underbase tutorial illustrator screen printing cover

When printing light coloured inks directly onto dark coloured garments with opaque color inks, like plastisol inks, the colors lose their intensity. To get around this, it’s best practice to first print a layer of white ink, known as an underbase. The underbase is printed first then dried to the touch with a heat gun or flash-curing machine before the rest of the color screens are printed. By using this method the colours will hold their vibrancy.

When screen printing multiple colors it can be very hard to align the print areas of each screen perfectly, even if the screens are aligned perfectly the white ink underbase can bleed a little, you would then see hints of white where there shouldn’t be. For this reason the underbase artwork is reduced in size slightly, this is called “choking” the artwork.
Choking the underbase gives the screen-printer a little bit of room to completely hide the underbase so it’s invisible to the naked eye.

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Flock Printing T-Shirts – A Graphic Designers Guide

flock printing designers guide screenprint t-shirt design

Did you know that some factories electrify t-shirts to create a flock t-shirt graphic? Me neither!

There are three ways (that we know of) to produce a flock print on a t-shirt or garment. In this definitive designers guide to flock printing t-shirts we will go over the differences, art requirements, available colors and best practices for flock printing from a graphic/apparel designer’s point of view, but before that, what is flock or flocking?

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High Density Ink – The definitive print guide for clothing design

High density ink the definitive designers guide apparel creation

Seeing a High Density print for the first time, my initial thoughts were, “that’s amazing! how’d they do that? When and how can I try this?” The 3D text protruding from the t-shirt graphic engaged my creative curiosity and so I delved into the wonderful world of High Density Inks!
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Screen Printing Metallic Inks: The Definitive Designers Guide.

The definitive designers guide to metallic inks POSTER 001

In this definitive designers guide to metallic inks, we cover: creating a metallic ink effect in Adobe Illustrator, screen printing with metallic inks, proper garment care instructions and there’s even a free high-resolution metallic ink texture giveaway.

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10+ Gold Foil T-Shirt Designs – Hand selected for your inspiration

10 Gold foil t-shirt designs hand selected for inspiration

We have scoured the web and hand selected a set of 10+ gold foil t-shirt designs to spark inspiration and also showcase what can be achieved with gold foil in t-shirt printing.

If you are interested in knowing more about screen printing with gold foil or how to create a gold foil effect in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, check out or post
Gold Foil: The definitive designers guide to gold foil, creating and screen printing the effect.
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Top 6 design inspiration web sources for apparel graphic design

Top 6 Apparel Graphic Design Inspiration web sources

Epic t-shirt graphic designs don’t just fall out of thin air!

That’s why we built this list of websites that we frequent often for creative design inspiration. We recognise that design inspiration can come from anywhere and at any time, however over the years we have realised that nine times out of ten we are under strict time constraints and randomly browsing the internet hoping to stumble across a design concept that fits the design brief can take hours and hours. This list has been tried, tested and refined over the years and is always our first go-to when we have a t-shirt graphic to design or a new vector art pack for the web store.

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