The Things Printers Don’t Tell You 👀

Matt Tenbush on September 17, 2026

NOTHING TO HIDE

The Things Printers Don’t Tell You: 5 Truths About Custom Apparel

There are things our industry doesn’t talk about enough. We think customers deserve to know them.

Welcome to Nothing to Hide, a new series from Austin Screen Printing & Austin Embroidery where we pull back the curtain on the custom apparel industry.

No sales pitch. No fine print. Just an honest look at how your merch actually gets made—and the things you should know before placing your next order.

After more than 50 years in this business, we’ve learned that building trust isn’t about pretending everything is perfect. It’s about setting honest expectations, communicating when something doesn’t go according to plan, and doing everything we can to make it right.

So let’s start with five truths about custom apparel that don’t get talked about nearly enough.

1. Your Final Quantity Might Not Be Exactly What You Ordered

Here’s something most people don’t realize: spoilage happens.

A garment can be damaged during screen printing, embroidery, curing, finishing, packing, or any of the other steps it goes through before reaching you. Even in a well-run shop, an occasional shirt isn’t going to make it into the final box.

So what happens if you ordered 250 shirts and only 249 make it through production?

At ASP, a lot of that answer comes down to time and communication.

If there’s enough time before your deadline, we’ll usually order a replacement and complete the quantity. If there isn’t, we’ll reach out. Maybe there’s flexibility to extend the deadline so we can replace it. Maybe receiving 249 instead of 250 isn’t going to affect your event.

Because every order is different.

If you’re ordering shirts for a third-grade field trip, every kid needs a shirt. One missing Youth Medium matters.

If you’re ordering 1,000 shirts for a trade-show giveaway, receiving 999 may be perfectly acceptable.

We don’t think we should make that decision for you.

Customers don’t like surprises—and neither do we. Communication and flexibility usually give us the best solution.

2. “Same Placement” Doesn’t Mean Mathematically Identical Placement

Here’s where the ruler can get us into trouble.

Custom apparel is still a hands-on manufacturing process. Shirts are loaded onto equipment by people, and the garments themselves aren’t perfectly symmetrical.

Collars move. Seams vary. Fabric stretches. One Large may sit slightly differently on the press than an XS or a 3XL.

That means a logo isn’t going to land at the exact same mathematical coordinate on every single garment.

Our rule of thumb at ASP is pretty simple:

If you can see the placement problem from a distance, we have a problem.

A print that’s obviously too high, too low, off-center, or crooked isn’t something we want going into your box.

But if you have to pull out a ruler to discover that one print is 1/8″ or 1/4″ different from another, that’s generally within a reasonable manufacturing tolerance.

We want every piece to look consistent, while recognizing that small variations are a normal part of the printing process.

3. The Same Ink Can Look Different on Different Shirts

This one surprises people.

We can use the same ink, same screens, same artwork, and same press setup and still see subtle differences in how a color appears from one garment to another.

Why?

The garment underneath the ink matters.

Printing on white cotton isn’t the same as printing on black. Natural fabric behaves differently than navy. Heather blends, polyester, performance fabrics, garment dyes, underbases, fabric texture, and even lighting can change how our eyes perceive the finished color.

This becomes especially important when an order includes several garment styles, colors, or fabric types.

Does that mean we just print it and hope for the best?

Absolutely not.

We’ve been doing this for a long time, and experience helps us identify many of these potential issues before your order reaches the press. If we see something in your order that could create noticeable color variation, we’d rather talk about it upfront than explain it afterward.

Setting honest expectations with our customers is foundational at ASP.

4. Your Shirt Isn’t Perfect Before We Print It

Here’s a secret that actually has nothing to do with printing:

We don’t manufacture the shirts.

Blank garments arrive at our shop from manufacturers around the world, and they have manufacturing tolerances of their own.

Sizing can vary slightly. Seams aren’t always perfectly straight. Collar alignment can differ. Fabric texture changes. Dye lots can create subtle shade differences.

One of the more interesting challenges comes from manufacturing locations.

The exact same brand, style, and color of shirt can sometimes be manufactured in different facilities—or even on different continents. That occasionally creates subtle differences in color, sizing, construction, or feel within what appears to be the exact same product.

That’s one reason your order doesn’t go straight from the delivery truck to the printing press.

At ASP, garments first go through receiving, where we verify quantities and look for quality issues before the order reaches production. Catching a problem before we print a shirt gives us a much better opportunity to correct it.

Sometimes the most important quality control happens before the first drop of ink ever touches the garment.

5. Misprints Happen—Even at Good Print Shops

There. We said it.

We occasionally misprint shirts.

On a busy week, as many as 30,000 garments can move through our shop. They’re being received, counted, sorted, printed, embroidered, cured, folded, boxed, checked, and moved between departments.

Our goal is always zero defects.

But we’re also going to be transparent with you: in manufacturing, expecting literally zero mistakes forever isn’t realistic.

A shirt gets loaded incorrectly. A thread breaks. Something shifts. A garment has a defect nobody spotted. Something that should have been caught during quality control occasionally makes it into a box.

We don’t believe the true measure of a printer is whether they can claim they’ve never made a mistake.

It’s what they do after one happens.

At ASP, we pride ourselves on making it right.

Sometimes that means replacing a shirt. Sometimes it means staying late. Sometimes it means getting creative because your event is tomorrow and simply reordering something isn’t an option.

Whatever the situation, we want you to be happy with the finished product, and we’ll do everything reasonable within our control to get you there.

Perfection Is the Goal. Transparency Is the Promise.

We could hide all of this in disclaimers and fine print.

We’d rather talk about it.

Custom apparel is a manufacturing process involving people, machines, ink, thread, heat, fabric, thousands of individual garments—and a whole lot of moving parts.

Things occasionally happen.

What matters is having a partner who’s willing to tell you what to expect before the order starts, communicate when something changes, and stand behind the product when it’s finished.

That’s what Nothing to Hide is about.

For more than 50 years, we’ve learned that trust isn’t built by pretending mistakes never happen.

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