Club, school and corporate kits

WHAT WE ACTUALLY DO

Four kinds of order account for nearly everything that leaves the bench. Cricket whites and coloured one-day kits. Football jerseys with names and numbers. School PE kit, usually a tee and shorts in house colours. Corporate shirts for a single weekend tournament. In almost every case the garment is ours: we hold blank stock in polyester micro-mesh, poly-viscose cream for whites, and cotton-poly for PE kit. If you already own the shirts and only want names and numbers added, we do that too, and it is the one job with no minimum.

The three ways ink gets onto cloth

Sublimation. The design is printed onto transfer paper, then heat presses the dye into polyester fibre. The panel is printed before the shirt is cut and sewn, so a sponsor block can run across a seam and the print has no thickness you can feel. Polyester only, and light polyester at that. It will not go onto cotton and it will not go onto a dark garment.
Heat transfer vinyl. A cut sheet pressed onto a finished shirt. This is how a name and number reach a jersey you already own. One shirt is possible. But the vinyl sits on top of the fabric, and it lifts if anyone irons the print directly or dries the shirt flat on a hot roof in May.
Screen print and embroidery. Screen print for cotton PE kit, one screen per colour, which is why a four-colour crest costs more than a two-colour crest on the same shirt. Embroidery for club crests on whites and blazers. A crest has to be digitised once before it can be stitched, and we keep that file, so your second order does not pay for it again.

WHAT WE NEED FROM YOU

Three things. The order does not move without all three, and the one that holds it up is almost always the first.

Crest artwork

Vector: AI, EPS, PDF or SVG. A crest lifted off a Facebook page at 600 pixels wide cannot be printed 90mm across a chest without going soft, and nothing we do at our end invents detail that was never in the file. If the vector is gone, which happens with clubs older than their current committee, we redraw it. Redrawing costs ৳2,000, takes two working days, and the file is yours afterwards.

A size list in inches

Chest measurement per player, not letters. A local M and a European M are two different shirts, and half a squad ordering by letter ends up in something that does not fit. We keep a sizing set with one shirt in every size in the fabric you have chosen. Book a sizing day at the club, or have us courier the set to you, and the list stops being a guess.

Half the money up front, in cash

Sublimation is not reversible. Once your crest is on a roll of polyester, that roll is yours and nobody else's. So we take 50 percent in cash when you approve the mock-up, collected by our rep on the sizing day or by a rider sent to you, and the balance in cash on delivery.

THE TIMELINE

Two weeks door to door is the honest figure for a Dhaka club with artwork ready on day one. This is where those days go.

Day 1: Order taken. Fabric, colour and cut chosen. Artwork received
Day 2 to 3: Digital mock-up sent, front and back, your crest in place
Day 4: Approval and cash deposit, collected by our rep. Nothing reaches the printer before both
Day 5: Sizing day at the club, or a confirmed size list from you
Day 6 to 11: Print, cut, stitch. Names and numbers go on last
Day 12: Checked against the size list, counted, packed
Day 13 to 14: Delivery. Same or next day inside Dhaka, two to four days elsewhere

Between November and February that stretches to three weeks. Inter-school sports and the winter cricket season land in the same eight weeks and every printing bench in the city is full. If the kit is for a December tournament, start in October. A reprint of one lost shirt takes five working days in any month, because a single shirt still goes through the same press as a run of forty.

PRICE BANDS

Per player, garment included, names and numbers included where the line says so. The spread inside a band is fabric weight and the number of print colours. The quote is fixed once we have seen the artwork.

Football jersey and shorts, sublimated, name and number: ৳950 to ৳1,400
Cricket coloured kit, shirt and trouser, sublimated: ৳1,600 to ৳2,200
Cricket whites, poly-viscose, embroidered crest: ৳1,800 to ৳2,600
School PE kit, tee and shorts, screen-printed crest: ৳550 to ৳800
Corporate tournament shirt, polyester, sublimated: ৳700 to ৳1,100
Name and number on shirts you already own: ৳150 per shirt, no minimum
Crest digitising for embroidery, one time: ৳1,500, file kept on file

WHY ELEVEN IS A REAL MINIMUM

The setup is identical whether the run is one shirt or fifty. A sublimation job needs a colour-matched test panel, a nested cutting layout for the roll, and a press run that cannot be shared with another club's colours. Screen printing burns one screen per colour, and those screens are yours and then binned. Spread across eleven shirts, that setup is a few hundred taka each. Spread across four, it costs more than the shirt does. We would be quoting ৳2,300 for a ৳900 jersey, and we would rather say so now than take the order.

Eleven is where the setup stops costing more than the shirt.

Two things still work below eleven. Names and numbers on stock jerseys, any quantity. And a plain stock club shirt with a heat-transfer crest, which we will do in threes and fours, at a higher price per shirt and with a print that will not last as long as a sublimated one.

WHAT GOES WRONG

Artwork arrives late

This is the delay, nearly every time. The committee approves the design in principle, then the one person with the file is travelling, and two weeks quietly becomes four. Our clock starts when artwork lands and the deposit is paid, not when you first message us. Work backwards from the date the kit has to be in hands and give yourself a week of slack.

A player changes size after the list is in

Happens on every school order and most club orders. A growth spurt, preseason fitness work, a month of weddings. Sublimated shirts cannot be let out, because the panel was cut to the size that was printed. Order two spares in the sizes your squad clusters around, usually 38 and 40 for adult clubs. A school order should carry three or four. Spares added to the original run cost only the garment. A single replacement three weeks later pays the whole setup again.

The wrong method for the garment

The costly mistake we see most: a club buys cotton jerseys elsewhere, then asks for sublimation on them. It cannot be done. Sublimation dye bonds to polyester and to nothing else. On cotton the options are screen print or vinyl, both of which sit on the surface and both of which wear off with washing. If the kit has to still look like a kit in season three, it has to be polyester, sublimated from the start.

Colour drift between the screen and the cloth

The navy on your phone is not the navy on the roll. Before the run we print a swatch of your two main colours and photograph it in daylight. Approve the swatch, not the mock-up on a screen. The clubs that skip that step are the ones asking in week three why the sky blue came back grey.

SIZING DAYS

We bring the sizing rack, a tape and the fabric swatches to your ground or school. One person sizes forty players in about ninety minutes if they are lined up and not still warming down. Free inside Dhaka on orders of twenty-five pieces or more, otherwise ৳1,500 and credited against the order. Outside Dhaka we courier a sizing set to all 64 districts, you keep it three days and send it back.

HOW TO START

Send the artwork and a rough headcount on WhatsApp to 01518 990333. Vector if you have it, whatever you have if you do not.
Tell us the date the kit has to be in players' hands. Not the date of the first match. The date it has to be in hands.
We come back inside two working days with a mock-up and a fixed price.
Approve, pay half in cash to our rep, then send the size list or book a sizing day.
We call twice: once before the run starts, once when the order is packed.

Ask for Rezaul or Shanto when you call. They run the kit orders. Send photos of an old shirt from last season if you still have one, front, back and the size label. It tells us more about how your players actually wear a kit than any size list does.