Pricing T-Shirts to Maximize Your Profits

Now that you’ve created a rocking t-shirt design, it’s time to sell your shirts to your community!

Whether you’re selling your shirts through a Bonfire Campaign, or ordering shirts through Bonfire Supply to sell at an event, it’s important you set reasonable selling prices so that you can maximize your sales and maximize your profits.

The price of your shirt can often be the deciding factor when it comes to whether or not your buyers will actually purchase your shirt. The art of pricing t-shirts is all about balancing your desired profit per shirt with the amount your audience might be willing to spend on the apparel item.

If your selling price is set too high, it will limit the number of people who will buy. The goal is to find a price that both you and your customers will feel good about.

3 Things You Should Ask Yourself When You’re Pricing T-Shirts

What are my sales goals?

The first step in determining your t-shirt price is to evaluate your overall goals for your shirt sales. What’s more important to you at this time – making a profit, or selling the most shirts possible?

If you aren’t concerned with making much of a profit, and care more about simply making your shirts available to your community, you can keep your selling cost low, and close to the base cost of the shirt.

However, you’re probably interested in making money from selling your shirts. In this case, focus on the ideal dollar amount of profit per shirt that you’d like to make.

How much will my buyers be willing to spend?

Thinking about the target audience of your campaign will help you determine how high or low to set your selling prices. For example, the younger your audience is, the lower you need to keep your selling prices.

Having trouble evaluating how much your buyers will be willing to spend? Survey a small selection of your audience to gather interest.

Does the base cost of the shirt I designed align with these goals?

If you’re finding that your base cost is higher than you would like it to be, you may consider simplifying your design. Because of the way screen printing works, the base cost increases if you have more colors in your design or if you print on both sides of the shirt instead of just one.

So, if making maximum profits with a reasonable selling price is important to you, we suggest sticking to a one-sided shirt design with 1-3 colors.

T-Shirt Profit Calculator

When you get to Step 2 in our t-shirt design tool, you will be able to adjust the pricing for each item in your campaign. You’ll see recommended pricing for each product automatically loaded onto the page, but you can edit these prices to meet your needs.

Use our free t-shirt profit calculator to get an idea of how much money you could make by selling your shirts on Bonfire.

Suggested Selling Prices for Our Shirts & Other Apparel Options

The tables below shows the suggested selling prices for all of the custom apparel options we offer in our product catalog.

While many members of the Bonfire community have set selling prices $3-5 above our recommendations with great success, the above prices are a great starting point.

Remember, overcharging or setting your selling prices really high will often minimize sales and end up making you less money in the end.

We recommend keeping prices reasonable and realistic, because after all, happy customers tend to become returning customers!