Custom Long Sleeve Shirts: The Complete 2026 Buyer's Guide

A good custom long sleeve shirt for a business comes down to three decisions, made in order: which of the four available brands fits the job, whether the logo should be embroidered or printed, and what sizing spread the team needs. Arklavo built this guide as the reference page for the full long sleeve program, 15 products across those four brands, covering embroidery and screen printing across men's and women's fits.

Most buyers land on this page searching for a general custom long sleeve shirt without a fixed idea of brand or decoration yet, so that is where we start. If you already know you want a specific comparison, the sibling guides linked throughout go deeper than a single overview page can.

What should you look for in a custom long sleeve shirt?

Look for a fabric that fits the job (heavyweight for cold work, garment-dyed for a softer feel, standard cotton for budget runs), a decoration method that matches your logo, and a brand with predictable sizing. A long sleeve shirt spends most of its life doing one of two jobs: layering under a jacket in a cold storage room, or standing alone as the visible top layer on a cool-weather shift. Which job it is doing should decide the fabric before it decides the color.

Every product in the custom long sleeve shirts collection is a long sleeve tee, not a button-up, polo, or performance layer. That keeps the comparison simple: the variables are brand, weight, decoration, and gender fit, not garment category.

What's the difference between Gildan, Champion, Comfort Colors and AS Colour?

Gildan is the budget standard, Champion carries the most brand recognition, Comfort Colors is garment-dyed for a softer worn-in feel, and AS Colour is the heavyweight option built for structure. Each brand comes in both embroidered and printed versions except Champion, which Arklavo currently stocks as printed for men's only and embroidered for both men's and women's.

If your team is large and the budget is fixed, start with Gildan printed at $17.99 and reserve embroidery for a smaller supervisor or front-of-house tier. If the shirt is meant to read as a premium branded item on its own, Champion embroidered at $48.99 is the top of the catalog for a reason. For a full side-by-side on the two most-requested brands, see our Gildan vs Comfort Colors long sleeve comparison.

Should you choose embroidery or screen printing?

Choose embroidery for a small, simple logo that needs to survive years of industrial washing, and choose screen printing for a larger, multi-color, or full-chest design at a lower per-unit cost. The two methods are not interchangeable substitutes for each other; they are suited to different logo shapes and different budgets.

Embroidery

Stitched thread holds its color and edges through repeated washing far better than most print methods, which is why it is the default for left-chest logos on garments that get worn every shift for years. Fine detail below a certain size gets simplified in digitizing, so a logo with small text or thin lines usually needs a slightly cleaned-up version for stitching. Across the four brands, embroidered long sleeve shirts run $33.99 to $48.99.

Screen printing

Printing handles gradients, photographic detail, and large-format artwork that embroidery cannot reproduce, and it costs less per unit because there is no digitizing or stitch time involved. It is the better call for a full-back design, an event date, or a logo with more than two or three colors. Printed long sleeve shirts across the four brands run $17.99 to $30.99, consistently below their embroidered counterparts.

Many teams end up mixing methods within one order: an embroidered chest logo for a supervisor or front-of-house tier, and a printed version for a larger back-of-house or seasonal run.

How heavy should the fabric be?

Choose AS Colour for genuine heavyweight structure, Comfort Colors for a softer garment-dyed hand, and Gildan or Champion for a standard cotton long sleeve that sits in between. Fabric weight is the difference between a shirt that layers well under a jacket and one that works as a standalone top layer through a full outdoor shift.

Heavyweight cotton

AS Colour is the only brand in this lineup explicitly built as a heavyweight long sleeve tee, in both embroidered and printed versions. It is the natural pick for outdoor crews, delivery staff, or any role where the shirt needs to hold up to cold and repeated washing without a jacket over it every time.

Garment-dyed cotton

Comfort Colors dyes the finished garment rather than the yarn, which is what gives it a softer, slightly faded hand right out of the package instead of after years of washing. That texture reads as casual and retail-like, which fits brands that want their staff or merch shirt to feel worn-in rather than corporate.

Gildan and Champion sit in the middle: dependable cotton long sleeve tees without a specific heavyweight or garment-dyed finish, which makes them the right default when weight and hand are not the deciding factor and price or brand name is.

How do you get sizing right for a team order?

Order across both the men's and women's fits Arklavo carries in each brand rather than assuming one unisex size runs the whole roster, and confirm sizing with a size chart before you place a multi-unit order. All four brands are stocked in both men's and women's cuts, so a mixed team does not have to compromise on fit to get a matching logo across the group.

Because fit runs differently by brand and by men's versus women's cut, the safest approach for any order past a handful of units is to check the size chart on the product page before committing, and to order one sample size before the full run if the team spans a wide size range. Our long sleeve shirt sizing and fit guide for teams covers how to collect sizes from a roster and avoid the most common team-order sizing mistakes.

How does the ordering process work, from proof to delivery?

You pick the brand and fit, upload or describe your logo, receive a free digital proof before any payment, and the order moves into production in about 2 days followed by 2 to 5 business days of shipping. There is no minimum order quantity on any long sleeve product, so the process is the same whether you need one shirt or a hundred.

The proof step matters most for embroidery, where fine detail in a logo sometimes needs to be simplified for stitching, and it is the point where you catch that before production rather than after. For printed designs the proof confirms placement and color match. Nothing goes into production until the proof is approved.

Arklavo ships globally, with a free-shipping threshold of $150 or the local-currency equivalent depending on where the order is going.

How much do custom long sleeve shirts cost?

Custom long sleeve shirts across the four brands run $17.99 to $48.99 per unit, with printed Gildan at the low end and embroidered Champion at the top. There is no separate setup fee bundled into the price and no minimum order that forces you to buy more than the team needs to hit a lower rate.

The two biggest cost levers are brand and decoration method, in that order. Moving from Gildan to Champion within the same decoration method changes the price by $11 to $15 per unit. Moving from printed to embroidered within the same brand adds a smaller but still meaningful amount, since embroidery carries digitizing and stitch time that printing does not. Stacking both, printed Gildan to embroidered Champion, spans the full $17.99 to $48.99 range.

For a full cost breakdown by brand, decoration, and order size, our custom long sleeve shirt cost guide lays out the math in detail. If your business also needs short sleeve options for warmer months, the custom t-shirts collection and custom embroidery apparel collection use the same brands, proof process, and no-minimum ordering as the long sleeve line.

Frequently asked questions

First-time buyers get stuck on the same handful of decisions. Quick answers follow, each one pulled from a section further up this guide.