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 Bonfire Campaign, order shirts through Bonfire Supply to sell at an event, it’s important you set reasonable selling prices.

The cost of purchasing your shirt can make or break whether your buyers will purchase your shirt. The art of pricing t-shirts is all about balancing your desired profit per shirt with the amount your audience will 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. 

3 things you should ask yourself when your pricing t-shirts

What are my sales goals?

The first step in determining your sales price is to evaluate your goals for shirt sales. What’s more important, profit, or selling the most shirts possible? If you don’t need to make much of a profit, and care more about just making your shirts available, you can keep your selling cost low, and close to the base cost of the shirt. But, most likely, you’re trying to actually make money in the process of selling your shirts. In this case, think about the ideal dollar amount of profit per shirt that you’d like to make.

How much will my buyers be willing to spend?

Depending on the target audience of your campaign, you may have limitations on how high you can set your selling price. 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 much higher than you want it to be, you may need to simplify your design. Because of the way screen printing works, the base cost increases as you have more colors in your design and as you print on two sides instead of 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 pricing calculator

When you get to Step 2 in our t-shirt design tool, you will be able to adjust your sales prices for each item in your campaign. We have recommended pricing that we suggest for each product automatically loaded onto the page, but you can edit these prices to meet your needs.

If you want to order your t-shirts instead of selling them online, you can use our t-shirt pricing calculator to get an estimated cost before you even get in the design tool.

Our suggested selling prices for t-shirts

The chart below shows Bonfire’s suggested selling prices for all of the custom apparel options 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. But remember,  overcharging or setting your selling prices really high will often minimize sales and end up making you less money in the end.