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Sue2

Imprint sizing for larger t-shirts?

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I usually try for 10" to 10.5" wide for a regular t-shirt logo imprint.......BUT recently I have been getting a bunch of shirts that are 2X, 3X and even a couple 6X. 

Do you all expand the design a bit to make it take up a little more space? 

I realize we are limited to the heat press platen size but I have a 16x20" press so that is not an issue for me....although those 6X shirts are HUGE!

I suspect these larger imprints should cost more....25% larger...25% more cost.

Thanks for any suggestions/input.

Sue2

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I used to try and size per shirt when using HTV but as my order sizes grew the complexity got to be too much. I now do one size for adults and then a smaller size for kids if needed. I typically take the smallest shirt and squeeze the largest size that I can get away with on it and use it on all the larger size. I HAVE offered a multi sized option a couple times when I first started worrying about this and both said all the same was fine. Now I am willing if the customer brings it up but I don't even bring it up on my end. 

Like you most of my sizes are around 10" standard width and 11 or 12 for a large look. The vertical size effects the width IMO. I had a guy who wanted a 11" wide one-off logo done on a hoodie. HAD to be 11 inches so i did it. It was 13" tall and almost touched the neck and pocket and he said afterword he wished he would have stuck with the 9 or 10 width I had suggested. 

I have gotten to the point with LC logo's that I print out about 3 sizes on paper and cut them out and see which one looks best before I commit. Usually around 4" but have some that look better a little wider and some a little smaller. 

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At 6'7" I wear a "3xl Tall."  When I was Fire Chief we had a lot of folks on the department that needed 3XL-5XL.  The local screen printing shop owners were close friends so we did a lot of experimenting. Found out we were wasting time doing multiple sized images for the front of shirts.  Most people can't tell the difference and if you make it real big the person looks like a walking billboard. . . and not in a good way.

The back of shirts was on a case-by-case basis. If it was a short but wide graphic then it sometimes needed to be made bigger on the backs of the larger shirts. This was especially true if it was arced.  Arced text on the back kind of needs to almost touch the shoulder blades to look good and when you start looking at someone my size that's quite a bit wider then a normal XL.

You also need to take the weight of all that vinyl or ink into consideration. The wider it gets, the more it wants to make the shirt sag.  When you scale up, the thickness of every stroke gets larger too, so if you put a 14" wide graphic on the front of a shirt there is going to be a lot of sweating going on.

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