Ask any small business owner who has ordered custom apparel before and most of them will mention the same frustration: the minimum order. Twelve shirts minimum. Twenty-four shirts minimum. Fifty for the good pricing tier. The minimum order is sold as a volume discount, but for a business that needs six shirts, not twenty-four, it is really a forced overpurchase. Cheap custom apparel with no minimum order flips that math entirely, and it is worth understanding exactly why.
A screen print shop needs enough volume to justify setting up a screen for your design. That setup cost gets spread across the run, so the shop requires a minimum to make the job worth doing. The problem: that logic has nothing to do with what your business actually needs. If you need 6 shirts and the minimum is 24, you are paying for 18 shirts you did not ask for.
| Need | Screen print minimum | Extra shirts forced | Single-piece order |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 staff shirts | 24 | 18 unused | Order exactly 6 |
| 1 new-hire shirt | 12 (wait for next batch) | Delay or 11 unused | Order 1, ships in about a week |
| 3 event giveaway shirts | 36 (per-color minimum) | 33 unused | Order exactly 3 |
Print-on-demand apparel is produced one order at a time. A shop with a logo uploaded once can sell or issue one shirt or a hundred, and each piece is the exact same price whether it is the first order or the fiftieth. There is no setup fee tied to volume because there is no separate setup step per order. This is why Bear Grips Pro Shops has zero order minimums on all 63 products, from the $19.88 VIP-base cotton tee to the $54.88 signature leggings.
Bear Grips Pro Shops: Custom Apparel for Your Team. No Minimums. Free Shipping.Bulk screen printing can still be the cheaper per-unit choice for a business ordering 50-plus of the exact same design, size, and color, all at once, with no reorders expected. Outside of that specific case, single-piece ordering through a print-on-demand shop like Bear Grips comes out ahead once you count the unused inventory that never gets worn.
No minimum order on any of the 63 products. Start free and order exactly what you need.
Start FreeNo. Every product across all 63 items and all plans (Free, Self-Service VIP, Done-For-You VIP) can be ordered one piece at a time.
The per-piece base price is the same whether it is the first order or the fiftieth. There is no volume discount because there is no volume-based setup fee.
Order exactly 3 or 4. There is no requirement to round up to a minimum batch size.
No. Orders ship in about a week regardless of order size, since each piece is produced individually rather than waiting for a batch to fill.
Bear Grips Pro Shops