"Can you do 300 shirts by tomorrow?" It's the question we hear most at the counter, and the honest answer is: it depends. Here's a straight-talking guide to realistic same-day t-shirt printing quantities — what a properly equipped shop can genuinely do in a day, and where the line sits.
The short answer
For simple designs on an in-house garment machine: dozens, comfortably. For complex multi-colour designs or very large runs: talk to us and we'll give you a straight answer rather than a hopeful one.
Small runs: 1–20 shirts
This is the sweet spot for same-day. One shirt or twenty, a full-colour design printed direct-to-garment takes minutes per shirt once your artwork is ready. Birthday shirts, stag do sets, a replacement batch for the team member whose size you got wrong — order in the morning, collect in the afternoon.
Medium runs: 20–100 shirts
Still very doable, but the method starts to matter. At these quantities a shop might split the job across methods or run it as one dedicated batch — which is why we ask about your design before promising a time. Order early in the day and same-day is realistic; order at 4pm and tomorrow becomes the honest answer. Company events, charity teams and sports clubs live in this bracket.
Large runs: 100+ shirts
This is screen-printing territory. Screens need preparing per colour, which means setup time — but once running, the per-shirt speed is excellent and the per-shirt cost drops sharply. For 100+ shirts, a few days' notice gets you the best price and zero stress. Genuinely urgent? Call and ask — bigger rush jobs than you'd expect do get turned around, but any shop worth using will under-promise here rather than gamble with your event.
(If you're wondering which method suits your quantity, we've compared vinyl vs DTG vs screen printing in plain English.)
What actually slows an order down
It's rarely the printing itself. The delays we see, in order of frequency:
- Artwork problems. A low-resolution logo that needs rebuilding can eat an hour before printing even starts.
- Dark garments. They need a white underbase layer first — an extra pass, extra time.
- Last-minute changes. "Actually, can we add two more names?" restarts the setup from scratch.
- Unconfirmed sizes. The group chat that never answers costs more time than the printer does.
A real example from the order book
Tuesday, 9:15am: a local five-a-side league calls — 22 shirts, team names on the back, needed for a 7pm kickoff after their supplier fell through. Artwork arrived by 10am as a clean PNG, sizes confirmed in one message, light garments in stock. Printed DTG with vinyl names, collected at 4:30pm. That's a normal same-day medium run when everything lines up. When it doesn't — blurry logo, sizes trickling in till 2pm — the same job becomes a tomorrow job. The machine is rarely the bottleneck; the admin is.
Does ordering more change the price per shirt?
Generally, yes — but not for the reason people think. The saving at higher quantities comes from spreading the setup across more shirts, which matters most for screen printing. For DTG, the per-shirt cost barely moves between 1 and 50, because there's almost no setup to spread. So if someone quotes you a dramatic bulk discount on a 20-shirt DTG job, ask what method they're actually using — the numbers should make sense for the process.
How to get the fastest possible turnaround
1. Send your artwork the night before, or first thing in the morning.
2. Confirm sizes and quantities in one message — not five drip-fed ones.
3. Keep the design simple if you're in a genuine rush.
4. Call +44 20 3507 1549 before you come in, so garments are set aside and ready.
Do those four things and you'll be surprised how fast "same-day" can actually be.
Got a number in mind?
Tell us the quantity and the deadline — call +44 20 3507 1549 or pop into 264 Lavender Hill, London SW11 1LJ (we're open daily) — and we'll tell you straight what's possible. No "computer says no", just an honest answer from people who run the machines.