What Custom Pool Team Shirts Actually Cost

You looked it up before you brought it to the team. A printer's billiards page said $10.41 a shirt, which sounded easy, so you told everybody twelve or thirteen bucks and went to bed thinking the hard part was picking a color. Then you put six in the quantity box and the total came back at nothing like that.

Most published prices in this business are quoted at fifty+ shirts. Your team has six, plus whoever joins in March. That gap is why the quote never matches the checkout page, and it is the whole reason captains get halfway through ordering and quit.

So here are our numbers at six, printed plainly, including the part most sites leave for the checkout page.

Why they quote at 50+ shirts

It's about their profit margin. The setup fee for screen printing is the same at 6 or 50 shirts. But at 50 the setup is negligible compared to the profit. So they quote it at 50 shirts to get the headline of $10.41 per t-shirt. But no poolhall or bar league team has 50 players.

The other thing that number assumes is that you are arriving with finished artwork. Are you? Most captains open the site's design tool, drop in a stock 8-ball, type the team name under it in whatever font is third from the top and stop. Or they upload something a teammate emailed them and get the low resolution warning back.

What six shirts cost here

Tees, front print, six players, first time out:

• Design service, one time: $50 for one design, or $75 for three. A design is one print placement, so $50 covers the front and $75 covers a front, a back and hoodie sleeves. Most teams only need the one. Unlimited revisions either way.
• Six tees: $142.74, which is $23.79 a shirt.
• Shipping: free, since the order is over $65.
• First order, all in: $192.74. Call it $32.12 a head.

Thirty-two dollars is a number you can say out loud on league night and get sizes back the same evening. It is also higher than the price you found, and there is no point pretending otherwise. What follows is where the two numbers stop describing the same thing.

The design fee, and what you get for it

Fifty dollars pays for a person sitting down and drawing your team's shirt, then redrawing it until you sign off. There is no revision limit and no clock running. If the third version is the one, the third version is the one.

It buys your team a graphic that belongs to your team. It stays private, it stays off everybody else's chest, and nobody in your division walks in wearing it in week nine. That is the part the design tool on a bulk site cannot sell you, because what comes out of a clip-art library is available to every other team that opens the same library.

And you pay it once. It does not come back next session, or when you add two players in March.

The second order is the one nobody prices for you

Go look at any custom shirt site and find the page that tells you what it costs to order six more next February. You will not find one, because their model does not really have a second order in it. Fifty shirts was supposed to be the end of the conversation.

A league team has a second order every other session. Somebody joins, somebody's went through the dryer on high, somebody wants the same graphic on a hoodie for the winter. With the design already done and paid for, the arithmetic from there is only the shirts:

• Six or more, any time you reorder: $23.79 a shirt.
• Three to five: $25.19 a shirt.
• One or two: $27.99, which is what a single replacement costs. There is no minimum and no setup charge to get in the door for one shirt.

Run that out across the sessions you are actually going to play. Six shirts in the fall costs $192.74, so $32.12 each. Six more in the summer adds $142.74, and now you are twelve shirts deep for $335.48, which is $27.96 a shirt. Another six after that and the running number is $26.57. The design fee keeps getting divided by a bigger number and it never comes back.

A fifty-shirt price has no answer for the guy who joins in March and needs one large.

Where the bulk printer genuinely wins

If you need fifty shirts, order fifty shirts from somebody who prints fifty shirts. A room running a house tournament, a charity night, a hall stocking merch behind the bar. That is what those prices are built for and they will beat us on it every time.

The comparison stops working at six because the two things being bought are different. Ten dollars and forty-one cents buys you one unit of a fifty-unit print run of a design you assembled yourself in a browser. Thirty-two buys an exclusive design, drawn for your team, that you can reorder one shirt at a time for as long as the team exists.

If your team doesn't want tees

Seven garment types carry the same design and the same volume tiers, so the design fee covers all of them at once. At six or more:

• Tee, tank, or women's cut: $23.79
• Long sleeve: $25.49
• Polo or pullover: $34.84
• Hoodie: $41.64

Teams mix. Four guys take tees, two take long sleeves because the hall keeps the air conditioning at meat-locker setting, and the tiers count the whole order together. Winter session, half the roster comes back for a hoodie with the same graphic on it, and there is no new design cost on that either.

The number you should actually say to the team

Thirty-two a head, tees, first order, everything included. If you split the design fee across the six of you it is eight dollars each on top of the shirt, which is less than the round somebody buys after a win.

Then go ask the hall to cover it before you ask anybody for money. Six shirts with their name on the back, walking into every other room in the division for thirteen weeks, is the cheapest advertising an owner will be offered all year. Plenty of them split it. Some cover the whole thing, and then the number you say to the team is zero. The rest of it, sizes and deadlines and what goes on the back, is in the captain's guide to team shirts.