Gildan Custom Shirts: 2026 Prices, Styles and No Minimum

If you have ever priced up shirts for a crew, a shop floor, or a fundraiser, you have already met the brand. Gildan custom shirts are the blank most businesses land on when they want a logo on something durable without paying designer-label money for it. This guide covers what the Gildan range actually costs once your logo is on it, where printing beats embroidery, which style fits which job, and how to order a handful instead of a pallet.

Why Gildan Ends Up on So Many Staff Backs

Gildan is the workhorse blank of the custom apparel trade, chosen less for fashion than for the fact that it survives contact with real work. It is a heavy, honest cotton shirt that takes ink well, washes without falling apart, and costs little enough that nobody panics when one gets ruined on a job site. That is the whole pitch, and it is a good one.

The trade-off is cut. Gildan runs boxier than the fashion blanks, with a fuller body and a slightly shorter, wider fit through the chest. Some people love that. Some people want something closer to the body, which is where a brand like Bella + Canvas earns its higher price, or where Comfort Colors wins on the washed, lived-in look. For a warehouse team, a golf day, or a church picnic, none of that matters as much as durability and price.

What Gildan Custom Shirts Actually Cost

Across the 45 Gildan styles Arklavo currently stocks, finished prices run from $5.99 to $52.99 per piece, with the middle of the range sitting near $29. Those are finished prices, not blank prices. The decoration and your first logo placement are already in the number, so there is no setup fee, no digitising charge, and no invoice surprise after you have committed.

Volume comes off that list price automatically at checkout, with no code to remember. Ten pieces takes 5% off. Twenty-four takes 10%, fifty takes 15%, and a hundred takes 20%. The ladder tops out at 25% from 250 pieces. A five-shirt order pays list, which is the point: it is allowed to exist.

Printed or Embroidered? The Numbers Say It Depends on the Garment

Embroidery costs far more on a T-shirt than it does on a hoodie, and most buyers never notice. Look at the same Gildan crewneck tee: $6.99 printed, $33.99 embroidered. That is close to five times the price for the same shirt. Now look at the pullover hoodie: $19.99 printed, $46.00 embroidered. Barely more than double.

The reason is that stitching costs roughly what stitching costs, no matter what it lands on. On a cheap tee that fixed cost dwarfs the garment. On a hoodie the garment is already carrying most of the price, so the thread disappears into it. The practical read is simple. If you want embroidery and you want it to feel like good value, put it on the heavier pieces. If the budget is tight and you are buying tees, print them. Our breakdown of embroidered versus printed shirts goes deeper on how each one wears over a couple of years, and the cost of embroidery guide explains what drives the stitch price itself.

One more thing worth knowing before you decide. Your first logo placement is included either way. Additional placements run $8.99 per piece, so a left chest logo plus a back print is one extra charge, not a second setup cycle. If you are undecided about where the logo should sit, the logo placement guide is worth five minutes.

Which Gildan Shirt for Which Job

Pick the weight for the work, then pick the decoration. Most ordering mistakes happen in the other order, when somebody falls in love with embroidery and then discovers it on a shirt too light to carry it.

• Giveaways, events, fun runs: the lightweight printed tee at $5.99. Nobody is wearing it for a decade, and that is fine.
• Daily staff wear: the heavyweight printed tee at $9.99. It holds its shape through repeat washing, which the light one will not.
• Outdoor crews and cooler months: the long sleeve at $17.99, or the crewneck sweatshirt at $18.99.
• Front-of-house and anything customer-facing: an embroidered crewneck or pullover hoodie at $46.00. Stitching reads as permanent in a way print does not.
• Kids teams and family businesses: the toddler and youth range, printed from $5.99 and embroidered from $29.49.

Sizing deserves its own look before you commit. Gildan runs roomy, and ordering a company-wide set off guesswork is how you end up with a box of unworn smalls. The Gildan size chart has the real measurements, and the guide to measuring shirt size covers how to check against a shirt somebody already owns and likes.

How Ordering Works When You Only Need a Few

There is no minimum, so the order you actually want is the order you can place. Much of the trade still runs on case packs and bulk tiers, which is why a four-person business asking for four shirts so often gets quoted for twenty-four. Arklavo builds around the small order instead of tolerating it.

The sequence is short. Send the logo, or ask for help with it if the file is a photo of a business card, which happens more than you would think. You get a free digital proof and a rough quote before any money moves. Approve it and the order ships in two days, free over $150 in the US, and Arklavo ships worldwide. Decoration is done in house using embroidery, direct-to-garment printing, and heat press, so the method gets matched to the garment rather than to whatever one machine happens to do.

If your artwork is heading for embroidery, preparing the logo properly makes a visible difference to how the stitch lands, particularly on small text.

From the Founder

I started this on Etsy in 2023 and rebranded to Arklavo in 2025, and the single most common thing I hear has not changed in that time. Someone needs six shirts and has been told six is not a real order. They have usually been passed around two or three suppliers by the time they reach us, and they open with an apology for how small the job is.

Gildan is where a lot of those conversations start, because it is the price point that makes a small run survivable. We have served more than 13,000 businesses, and plenty of them came in at five or six pieces and grew from there. The whole company is built to say yes to that first small order rather than to price it out of existence. No outside investment, a lot of automation doing the boring parts, and a stubborn refusal to charge setup fees on top of a price we already quoted.

Conor Smart, Founder, Arklavo

Gildan Custom Shirts: Common Questions

Related Guides

• Custom T-shirt pricing guide
• DTG versus screen printing
• The complete T-shirt size chart
• Polyester versus cotton shirts
• Custom Bella + Canvas T-shirts

Pricing reflects Arklavo's live catalog as of July 14, 2026, and is subject to change. Gildan is a trademark of its respective owner. Arklavo is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Gildan.