Logo Versus Laundry: Which Promo T-Shirt Lasts the Longest?

Brief Explanations of Different T-Shirt Printing Methods

Direct-to-garment (DTG) printing

Like printing on your home printer, but with a special printer that prints – yes – directly on the garment.

Heat transfer printing

The design is printed onto a film, which is placed on top of the t-shirt, and forced under pressure and heat to stick onto the fabric. (We wrote a whole blog post about this if you want to know more.)

Screen printing

The imprint method we use most often! You lay a screen stencil of your design over a shirt and scrape ink over it. The ink goes through the cutout sections, sticks to the shirt, and that’s your imprint. Best for designs that only use one or two colors.

Sublimation

The design is printed onto special film using heat-activated inks. When you put the film on your t-shirt and heat it up, the inks turn into gas and combine with the fabric strands. Only works on fabric with a high polyester content.

Why T-Shirts Shrink

The main culprit in t-shirt shrinkage is cotton. All the shirts we tested contain some cotton, ranging from a 65% polyester 35% cotton blend to 100% cotton.

Cotton has a lot of qualities that make it great for t-shirts. It can be spun into different weights to make thick or lightweight fabric. It’s durable, soft, and breathable, meaning it allows air to flow through the fabric and keep you cool.

However, the process of making cotton into fabric also makes it susceptible to shrinkage. The cotton fiber is spun into long, thin yarn, which is woven together into a fabric. The spinning process stretches the cotton out: but heat, water, and/or agitation – three things you get in a washing machine or dryer – make the fibers relax back into their original state. It’s like when you stretch out a rubber band then release it. On a t-shirt, that looks like shrinkage.

This is why manufacturers use polyester/cotton blends. Polyester is a plastic fiber made by combining a bunch of molecules in a chain. Unlike cotton, it’s not breathable, but it is durable and water-resistant, and can withstand comparably high heats without changing shape. All of this means it’s less likely to shrink in the laundry. When blended with cotton, it can help create garments that are less susceptible to shrinking – although not entirely (spoiler alert.)

Method

Results

How did our brave contestants cope with the grueling ordeal of 25 wash and dry cycles in an average household washing machine and dryer? Remarkably well on the logo durability front – but if you’ve ever felt like your t-shirts were shrinking, you weren’t necessarily deluding yourself.

Brand	Material	Logo Application Method	Shrinkage	Observations	Flipbook
Adidas	100% cotton	Screen printing	Shoulder width shrinkage: 1.5” Chest width shrinkage: 0.5” Hem width shrinkage: 1.25” Length shrinkage: 3”	The logo still looked brand new by the end, but the t-shirt shrunk significantly, losing 2.75” from its length, 1.25” in hem width, and 0.5” from its chest width in 8 washes. The shoulder width continued to shrink until the 13th wash, losing a total of 1.5” in width.
Carhartt	100% cotton	Screen printing	Shoulder width shrinkage: 1.5” Chest width shrinkage: 0” Hem width shrinkage: 1” Length shrinkage: 2”	The logo showed no signs of wear by the end. This t-shirt was in the middle of the pack for shrinkage. It lost 2” in length and at least an inch from the hem and shoulder width, but nothing in chest width.
Champion	50% cotton 50% polyester	Screen printing	Shoulder width shrinkage: 0.5” Chest width shrinkage: 1” Hem width shrinkage: 0.75” Length shrinkage: 1.75”	The logo was barely faded by the end. However, the chest shrank by a full inch, the joint second biggest chest width change. All shrinking stopped after the 11th wash.
NASA	60% cotton 40% polyester	Direct-to-garment (DTG) printing	Shoulder width shrinkage: 1.5” Chest width shrinkage: 1” Hem width shrinkage: 1.25” Length shrinkage: 2.5”	It’s harder to tell if “distressed” logos are fading, but there appears to be less of the darker blue by the end. The length and shoulder width both shrank by nearly 8% over the course of 18 washes, and the chest and hem both lost at least 1”.
Nike (White Logo on Black Shirt)	100% cotton	Screen printing	Shoulder width shrinkage: 0.5” Chest width shrinkage: 0” Hem width shrinkage: 0.5” Length shrinkage: 2”	This shirt shrank at lower rates than the same shirt in white, losing 2” of its length over 20 washes, and nothing from the chest. So that’s weird. And while its logo also fuzzed around the edges in a similar way, it didn’t crack and the damage was harder to see.
Nike (Black Logo on White Shirt)	100% cotton	Screen printing	Shoulder width shrinkage: 1.5” Chest width shrinkage: 1.5” Hem width shrinkage: 0.75” Length shrinkage: 2.75”	By wash 25, up close, the logo was looking a little fuzzy and cracked – but these weren’t visible from a polite distance. This t-shirt was among the biggest shrinkers, losing nearly 3” in length over the test, and the most of all our shirts – 1.5” – in the chest.
QLP Full Color	65% polyester 35% cotton	Full color transfer	Shoulder width shrinkage: 0.5” Chest width shrinkage: 0.5” Hem width shrinkage: 0.75” Length shrinkage: 0.75”	This t-shirt showed relatively little shrinkage but the logo fared the worst of all, showing obvious cracking within the first 10 washes.
QLP Faded Color	65% polyester 35% cotton	Sublimation	Shoulder width shrinkage: 0” Chest width shrinkage: 0” Hem width shrinkage: 0.75” Length shrinkage: 0.5”	Almost no noticeable shrinkage. The logo was designed to look faded and it looked exactly the same by the end!
QLP Gray	50% cotton 50% polyester	Heat transfer	Shoulder width shrinkage: 1” Chest width shrinkage: 0” Hem width shrinkage: 0.5” Length shrinkage: 0”	Second-worst logo wear, with cracking obvious as early as the fifth wash. However, it had very little shrinkage all round.
Under Armor Blue Flag	60% cotton 40% polyester	Screen printing	Shoulder width shrinkage: 0.5” Chest width shrinkage: 0.5” Hem width shrinkage: 1” Length shrinkage: 0.75”	Very little shrinkage and the logos on the chest and sleeve were still super crisp by the end of 25 wash and dry cycles.
Under Armor Red Flag	60% cotton 40% polyester	Screen printing	Shoulder width shrinkage: 1.5” Chest width shrinkage: 0.5” Hem width shrinkage: 1” Length shrinkage: 1.5”	Lost 2x as much length as the other Under Armor shirt, and 3x as much from the shoulder width. But the logos still looked basically unchanged by the end.

Key Takeaways

Screen prints on t-shirts are very durable

Most of the imprints that made it through 25 wash and dry cycles still looking good as new were applied using screen printing – which is good news, since this is how we print the majority of our t-shirts! Screen printing has major staying power, in that it’s been used for over 1,000 years, and during that time, printers have figured out techniques and materials that will stand up to significant wear. Most of our screen printed imprints showed no signs of wear at all.

Direct-to-garment did a respectable job

The t-shirt with the NASA logo was created using direct-to-garment (DTG) printing. It helped that it started with what you could call a distressed vintage look, which made any fading look fashionably intentional. As someone who has spent an ungodly amount of time staring at this t-shirt, I do think that some of the darker blue color faded by the end.

While DTG allows for full color designs – unlike screen printing – it uses water-based inks which tend to deteriorate through wash cycles. In this case, that fading adds to the charm, but it might not if you don’t want your shirt to look like you’ve had it since the first moon landing.

Sublimation printing looked untouched

The white t-shirt with the faded QLP logo was printed using a type of sublimation printing. Sublimation is extremely durable, because unlike the other types of imprinting mentioned in this article, the ink goes inside the fabric on a molecular level, rather than sitting in a layer on top of it. That means it’s far less susceptible to the friction that happens with washing.

The results from our sublimated QLP t-shirt reflected this. Granted, yes, it was printed to look slightly faded to begin with – but there was no wear and tear at all after the 25th wash and dry cycle, and the colors were just as bright as they were at the beginning.

The transfers did not do very well

One imprint category was a clear loser, and those were the heat transfers. You can see these on the white t-shirt with the bright QLP logo, and the gray t-shirt with the gray QLP logo.

Transfers sit on top of the fabric, which makes them highly susceptible to friction in the wash. They’re not as flexible as ink or sublimation, which means they tend to crack with movement. While they are a relatively affordable way to create full-color designs, unfortunately they don’t last very long. The big and bright QLP t-shirt was showing cracks by the 10th wash, and the imprint of the gray t-shirt was obviously faded by wash five.

The length shrank the most

Surprisingly, at least to me, the shirts lost more length than width. They shrank by an average of 1.5” in length over the test, compared to about 1” in width each from the shoulder and hem, and 0.5” from the chest. So next time you’re ordering t-shirts and want to make sure they fit even after a few washes, take into account that you could lose 2” or more in the length. And read our blog post about how to choose t-shirt sizes.

The reason I was surprised is because I didn’t know the science behind this. Yes, more science! It comes back to the way woven cotton fabrics behave when they get wet. Woven fabrics are made up of warp threads, which run from top to bottom, and weft threads, which interlace between the warp threads from side to side. When you wash the fabric, the threads absorb water, which makes them expand and move closer together. In doing so, they pull on the warp threads and shorten the length of your shirt.

That also means that different parts of the shirts shrink in width at different rates. This could explain why we noticed rippling in some of the collars: The collar fabric could shrink at a different rate than the neckline, causing it to pucker. While all this could theoretically lead to some seriously weirdly shaped t-shirts, the chest was also typically slightly smaller than the hem width at the beginning, so the different shrink rates weren’t as noticeable.

Most shrinking happens in the first 10 to 20 washes

Although all the shirts shrank at least a little bit in at least one area, the good news is that it doesn’t appear that your shirt will continue to shrink indefinitely, until you’re forced to donate it to the nearest Barbie.

The most dramatic shrinking (over 1”) usually happened within the first five washes. After that point, the shirts shrank by smaller amounts – typically 0.25” to 0.5” – and they didn’t shrink after every wash and dry. Around half stopped shrinking after a maximum of 15 washes, and the rest stopped after 20. What happens after 30? If you do that experiment, let us know!

There’s a winning fabric blend in the fight against shrinkage

In our experiment, the blend of materials that consistently resulted in the least total shrinkage was 65% polyester 35% cotton.

When you add up all the inches lost across all areas, shirts made of 100% cotton lost between 3” and 6.5”, shirts with 60% cotton and 40% polyester lost between 2.75” and 6.25”, and the 50/50 cotton/polyester shirts lost 1.5” and 4”. But the two 65% polyester 35% cotton shirts lost 1.25” and 2.5” respectively, which makes this the most consistently low-shrinkage blend.

This makes sense because as you’ll remember, polyester is less prone to shrinking in the laundry than cotton. So a t-shirt that has more polyester than cotton should shrink less than a t-shirt with more cotton in it. This mostly held true in our experiment. All the shirts with more polyester than cotton or an equal blend of both were in the top six of shirts that shrank the least, and the five that shrank the most were either mostly cotton or 100% cotton.

However, one of our 100% cotton shirts (the black Nike shirt) showed the fifth lowest shrinkage. Some 100% cotton shirts are “preshrunk” during manufacturing, to reduce the shrinkage customers see when they wash the garment at home. It’s something you can look for if you want that sweet cotton breathability with less shrinkage risk. This may explain this shirt’s overperformance, although weirdly, its white counterpart shrank the most – 6.5” total across all areas, more than double the black Nike shirt.

The Bottom Line

Whether you’re buying a promo t-shirt or a t-shirt from a brand, you can make sure your logo keeps that just-printed look as long as possible – even with regular washes – by looking for imprints created through screen printing or sublimation.

Screen printing is typically used for one or two colors, which makes it a great choice for printing logos. Sublimation can do full-color designs, but requires a shirt with a high polyester content. Fortunately on that front, we found that the fabric blend that consistently shrank the least was 65% polyester and 35% cotton, which works for sublimation.

Most importantly, we learned that yes, your t-shirt is gaslighting you: It probably did shrink since you first bought it.