If your booster club, team or school group in Southern Utah is planning a spirit wear fundraiser, the order decisions that matter most are made before anyone sees a design: one or two garments, one decoration method per garment, and a price set from your real per-piece cost. At Pulse Merch, our Cedar City shop screen prints and embroiders for groups across the region, and the fundraisers that go well are the simple ones, built around screen printed tees and hoodies with embroidery saved for the pieces that earn it.
You already know the basics of group apparel. This is about the choices that decide whether you clear your goal or end up with a box of mediums in the equipment room.
Start with the item count, not the design
Most groups open with a long wish list: tee, hoodie, hat, tank, crewneck, youth sizes, a sticker. Every added item multiplies your size runs and your leftover risk. The SignUpGenius guide to selling spirit wear recommends one or two core items with simple branding, and that matches how orders behave in a print shop.
A practical starting point for a school or club:
- One tee in a color the whole community already owns something in.
- One heavier layer, usually a hoodie or crewneck, for the families who want to spend more.
- A hat only if someone will take responsibility for the stitching quote and the extra lead time.
Two items give you two screens or two decoration setups, one proof round and one production schedule. Five items give you five of each, and the fifth one is the one that sits in the garage.
Screen printing vs. embroidery: pick by garment and use
This is the decision groups get wrong most often, so here is how we sort it.
Screen printing is the default for fundraiser tees and hoodies. Ink is pushed through a mesh screen onto the fabric, and once the screens are made, each additional shirt costs little. That is why it suits a sale where you might move 150 tees across a school and its parents. It handles big chest and back graphics, mascots and bold type well. If you want the mechanics, our screen printing process explainer walks through it.
Embroidery makes sense on structured hats, quarter-zips, polos and jackets, where a small left-chest logo reads as a finished piece. Thread holds up to heavy washing and sun, and it looks sharper on a coach’s jacket than ink does. It is a poor fit for a full mascot illustration with gradients or fine detail, and it costs more per piece. Our guide to how embroidery works covers what the stitch count does to the price.
Heat printing earns its place for names and numbers, small runs, or a one-off personalization on top of a shared design. It is the right tool for adding a player name to a team piece, less so for printing 200 identical tees. Our page on heat transfer disadvantages is worth a look before you commit it to a high-wash garment.
A simple rule: if the artwork is big and the quantity is large, screen print. If the artwork is small and the garment is structured or premium, embroider. If it needs a name, press it.
What we learn from garments that fail
Here is the kind of problem that keeps showing up in orders from groups. A club picks a very cheap, thin tee because the unit cost looks good on the spreadsheet. The print itself is fine, but the shirt shrinks, twists at the seam and goes limp after a few washes, and the parents who bought it blame the fundraiser, not the blank. A second one: a group sends a low-resolution logo pulled from a website, and the edges come out soft on a 12-inch chest print. Neither is a printing failure you can fix after the fact.
The takeaway is to spend your money in the blank and the artwork. A slightly better tee at a dollar or two more per piece survives the school year, and a clean file costs less than a reprint. Our printer-ready file checklist lists what to send, and the page on AI-generated logos that do not print well explains a mistake that is getting more common.
Price from your cost, and run the math before you announce
Your profit is the sale price minus every cost attached to the piece: the blank garment, the decoration, any setup, shipping or delivery, and any payment fees if you sell online. The SignUpGenius guide makes the same point: know the per-item cost before you set a price. The cost drivers on our side are covered in what affects the cost of custom apparel.
A worked example with made-up numbers, not a quote. Say your all-in cost on a tee is $11 and you sell it at $22. You make $11 on each shirt. Sell 120 and your gross profit is $1,320. Now say a card processor takes a bit of each online sale and a few families request a size you did not pre-order. The real figure ends up lower than the spreadsheet, so build a cushion into the goal.
Two pricing habits help:
- Price the hoodie on its own margin. A hoodie costs far more than a tee, and the same $11 markup would leave you underpriced on it.
- Round to a number families will pay without thinking, such as $20 or $25 for a tee, and put the premium on the heavier layer.
For more on how groups set margins on shirts and other items, see these event merchandise ideas and costs.
Your design time can also be a cost. Our graphic design service is $75 per hour, so sending print-ready art, or letting us clean up an existing logo, keeps that line small. See the graphic design page for how it works.
Pre-order or stock: how you sell decides your risk
There are two ways to run the sale.
Pre-order with a closing date. Families order and pay by a deadline, you submit one consolidated order, and you only buy what is sold. This is the safer option for a first fundraiser. The same SignUpGenius guide describes a sale window of two to three weeks as common, which creates enough urgency without letting the campaign drag. A pre-order also avoids leftover sizes, a point made in this walk-a-thon breakdown of spirit wear ordering and margins.
Stocked inventory. You buy a set quantity and sell it at games, open houses and school events. You keep more of the margin per piece, and you carry the risk of sizes that do not move. This only makes sense if you have a venue where people will see the shirts in person, such as a regional tournament or a school carnival, and a rough idea of your size mix.
If you go pre-order, build the order form around size, item and name. An order report sorted by student or family name makes handing out the finished goods a ten-minute job instead of an afternoon. Close the order on the date you announced, not a few days later: each extension pushes your delivery date and your event date with it.
For sizing a stocked order, our guide on how many shirts to order gives a practical way to split sizes. Youth sizes matter for school groups, and we cover that in youth apparel customization.
Design for the sweatshirt people will wear on a Tuesday
Spirit wear sells when people wear it outside the event. The PPAI Expo 2026 fashion roundup points to promotional apparel moving toward retail-inspired everyday wear with refined fits and versatile layers. For a fundraiser that means a mascot or wordmark someone is happy to wear to the grocery store, not a crowded sponsor poster.
A few production-side choices that help:
- Keep to one to three ink colors on a standard tee. Every extra color is another screen and another pass on press.
- Put the biggest, boldest element where the eye lands first. Larger, bolder text gets noticed before smaller text, a hierarchy principle laid out by nonprofit merch designers.
- Use a small left-chest mark or sleeve print on hoodies if you want the shirt to look less like a fundraiser and more like a team piece.
- Choose garment colors that hold the ink well. Light ink on dark cotton needs an underbase, which adds a step and cost.
For common pitfalls on the art side, see our list of design mistakes to avoid for custom apparel prints.
Team apparel and trade show orders are a different job
Team apparel fundraisers often become an ongoing program: a tee for the whole roster, then hoodies for the winter season, then a quarter-zip for the coaches. Build the first order so the second one is easy. Keep the same artwork file, the same ink colors and the same blank, and you can reorder without redoing proofs or matching colors again. Our page on custom apparel for teams covers how groups handle this.
If your business also needs trade show or crew apparel, the same rule applies, with a shift in decoration: polos and jackets with embroidered logos for the booth, screen printed tees for volunteers and staff. The screen printing on workwear guide is a good reference if the garments will see a job site.
Timeline: work backward from the event
A fundraiser calendar fails when the sale ends the week before the big game. Work backward from the date you want shirts in hand: delivery or pickup, then production, then proof approval, then the order close, then the sale window. Leave slack for a proof revision, because the first proof is rarely the last. We explain what drives lead time in custom apparel timelines.
Tell families both dates up front: when the order closes and when the shirts arrive. Most complaints come from people who thought they were buying a shirt for Friday.
Our view on fundraiser orders
We run Pulse Merch from Cedar City, and everything we produce is made in-house in Utah. That matters on a fundraiser because the people deciding the order are volunteers with a deadline and no appetite for surprises. When the print shop is the same team that checks the file, makes the screens and presses the shirts, a question about a color or a garment gets a direct answer.
Our advice is the same each time. Choose fewer items. Spend on the blank. Screen print the volume, embroider the pieces that deserve thread, and press names where they belong. Send clean artwork, set the price from your real cost, and close the sale on the date you said you would.
We have worked with schools, teams, bands and local businesses since 2012, and the groups that come back for a second order are the ones that kept the first one simple.
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Getting a quote for your group
Tell us the item, the quantity range, the artwork you have and the date you need shirts, and we can match the decoration method to the garment. Screen printing, embroidery and heat printing are all done in our shop, and we ship across the United States if your group is spread out.
Start with screen printing for tees and hoodies, or embroidery for hats and jackets, and request a quote from there. If you are ordering for a school, how to order custom merch for schools lays out what to have ready.
FAQ
How many items should a spirit wear fundraiser offer?
One or two. A tee and a hoodie cover most groups, since each added item brings more sizes and more leftover risk. Add a hat or a quarter-zip only after the first sale shows demand.
How long should the sale window be?
Two to three weeks is a common range for spirit wear sales, according to the SignUpGenius guide. It is long enough for families to see the announcement and short enough to keep urgency. Publish the closing date and the delivery date together.
Is screen printing or embroidery better for a school fundraiser?
Screen printing fits tees and hoodies with large graphics and larger quantities. Embroidery fits hats, polos and jackets with a small logo. Many groups use both: screen printed shirts for the sale, embroidered pieces for coaches, staff and top-tier buyers.
How do I figure out how much profit we will make?
Add the blank, the decoration, setup, shipping and any payment fees to get your cost per piece. Subtract that from the sale price and multiply by the number sold. Then reduce the total a little for size swaps and misprints.
Can we order for a team that is not in Utah?
Yes. We produce in Utah and ship across the United States, so a team or club in another state can send artwork, approve a proof and receive the order by shipment.
Sources
- How to Sell Spirit Wear and Fundraising Apparel (SignUpGenius)
- Spirit Wear Fundraisers: Ordering, Margins, Logos (Walk-a-thon)
- Fashion Finds From The PPAI Expo 2026 (PPAI)
- 5 Effective Design Elements to Include in Nonprofit Merch (Recharity)
- Event Merchandise Ideas That Sell: 25+ Picks and Costs (Actickety)