Ordering Custom Apparel From Anywhere in Canada: A Shipping Guide

The objection we hear most from outside Ontario is some version of "but you're in Ottawa and I'm in Victoria."It's a fair instinct. Apparel is a physical thing, and people reasonably want to see it before money changes hands. But if you take that instinct apart, the only job the counter was ever doing was letting you check the design before you committed — and a digital mockup does that job better, because you get to keep it.

Step one: get us the artwork. Email a PNG, JPG, SVG or PDF to order@yayaprints.ca, or skip the email entirely and build the whole thing yourself in the free online design studio. You can upload your own file, knock the background out in one click, drag and resize it on the garment, add text from the built-in font library, pick your garment colour, and place art on the front, back, left chest or sleeve. If all you have is a low-resolution logo pulled off a website, our vectorization service rebuilds it clean — and this guide to preparing logo files covers what makes a file print-ready in the first place.

Step two: a free mockup comes back, usually the same business day.Not a stock photo with your logo pasted on it — your art, at the real size, on the real garment colour, so you can see whether that left-chest print is going to read from across a room. Nothing is charged at this stage. A named person on our end handles your job from that point, so you're replying to a human, not a ticket number.

Step three: you approve, and the price is locked.The quote spells out the garment, the print method, the placements, the size breakdown, shipping, and the tax line — Ontario HST is 13%. You reply "approved" and pay. That written approval is the moment your order becomes real.

Step four: we print it. Standard turnaround is 2–5 business days after approval and payment, and rush work is often 1–2. Everything happens in our own shop in Ottawa — nothing is drop-shipped from overseas, so nobody in the chain is guessing about your deadline. There's more detail on where the days actually go in how long custom apparel takes.

Step five: it ships, and you get tracking.The tracking number is emailed the day the box leaves. From there it's the same courier network that brings you everything else you buy online.

This is the part worth slowing down on, because it's the whole reason ordering remotely works at all.

When somebody walks into a shop and describes what they want, the shop writes down its interpretation. Two weeks later, if the print sits lower than expected or the blue is a shade off, there is nothing to check the finished shirts against except two people's memories of a conversation. We've all been on both ends of that.

A mockup is evidence.It's a dated image showing the garment, the colour, the artwork and the placement, sitting in your inbox with your written "approved" under it. If the finished order doesn't match it, that's our problem to fix, and there's nothing to argue about. Remote customers end up with a tighter paper trail than walk-ins do — which is the opposite of what most people assume.

So use the approval properly. Zoom in. Check the spelling of every word, including the ones you wrote yourself. Check the print size against the smallest garment in your run, not the largest — one print size normally runs across the whole order. Check the garment colour on a screen you trust. If something looks off, say so; revisions before approval are free and expected, and we would far rather redo a mockup than a box of shirts.

If you want a second opinion on the design itself before you approve, our design guide covers the mistakes that only show up once something is printed.

Here is the honest version. The numbers below are transit time only — they get added on top of production, they start the day the box actually leaves our shop, and they count business days.

Treat that table as a planning tool, not a promise.We don't drive the trucks. Winter storms, a backed-up sorting facility, and the stretch between late November and the end of December all move these numbers, sometimes by several days. For current published service standards to a specific postal code, check Canada Post directly rather than trusting any print shop's round numbers, including ours.

Northern and remote addresses deserve a separate conversation.A parcel to Iqaluit, Whitehorse or a fly-in community isn't a slightly slower version of a parcel to Calgary; it's a different route with different frequency. If that's you, tell us the destination before you approve the mockup and we'll work backwards from your event date instead of forwards from today.

The practical rule for anyone outside Ontario: add production and transit together, then add a buffer.A BC customer wanting shirts for a Saturday should be approving a mockup roughly two weeks out, not the Monday before. That's not us being slow — 2–5 days in the shop is quick — it's the geography of the country.

Shipping is free Canada-wide on orders over 12 pieces. That threshold is deliberately low, because 12 pieces is about where a real order starts — a small team, a wedding party, a first product drop. Under 12 pieces, shipping is quoted at cost and shows as its own line on the quote before you pay, so you never find it at checkout.

It's worth being clear about what shipping does and doesn't change about your per-piece price, because a lot of shoppers assume distance makes custom apparel more expensive. It doesn't. The price drivers are the garment, the print method, the number of placements and the quantity. A basic one-colour screen print on a standard cotton tee runs roughly $12–$18 each at 50 pieces and can drop under $10 in the hundreds. Small full-colour DTF runs sit a bit higher per piece but carry no setup cost at all. Adding a back print is about +$7 a piece; embroidery is about +$10. Those are approximate ranges — garment choice moves them.

Two consequences follow from that, and they matter more the farther you live from us. First, consolidate. One order of 40 shirts ships free; four separate orders of ten each pay shipping four times and lose the volume pricing. Second, decide the whole order before you approve, because adding six more shirts a week later is a second job with a second shipment, not an amendment.

If you're still weighing methods, the cost logic is broken down properly in what custom t-shirt printing costs in Canada, and the small-order guide explains why the answer flips below about a dozen pieces.

This comes up constantly now, and it's the single most useful thing on this page for distributed companies: one order can go to more than one address.

The classic case is a team of fifteen people in nine cities. You want everyone in the same hoodie for the same launch, but there is no office to ship a single box to. So we print the whole run together — same garment lot, same press setup, same day — and then split it into individually addressed parcels. You still get the volume price, because pricing keys off the total quantity printed, not the number of boxes.

What we need from you is a clean list: full name, complete address with postal code, and the size for each person. A spreadsheet is perfect. What slows this down is almost never the printing — it's chasing three people who never sent their size. Collect sizes first, then order. Our guide to organizing a group order has the mechanics, and the remote-team playbook deals with the distributed-workforce version specifically, including onboarding boxes for new hires.

A few honest caveats. Individual parcels are small parcels, so per-address shipping costs more in total than one consolidated box — the free-shipping threshold is built around a single destination, and we'll quote a split job transparently before you approve. Parcels also arrive on different days; a shipment to Halifax and one to Nanaimo leaving the same hour will land days apart. If everyone needs to open theirs together, pick a "do not open until" date rather than hoping the couriers cooperate.

Printing is only half the job. A shirt that survives the press and dies in a box helped nobody, so packing is a real step here rather than an afterthought.

• Folded print-side in, then bagged. Print against print is what causes scuffing over a long haul. Folding the decorated face inward puts fabric against fabric instead.
• Clear poly bags per garment or per size block. This is the part people underrate. It keeps moisture off the goods if a box sits on a wet loading dock, and it means a group order can be handed out without anyone unfolding twelve shirts to find the mediums.
• Sorted and labelled by size.For team orders we bag and mark by size so distribution takes minutes. For split shipments, each person's parcel is packed and labelled for that person.
• A packing slip in every box.It lists what should be inside. Check the box against it — that's what it's for.
• Fully cured before it's bagged.Ink has to be properly cured before anything gets sealed up, whether it's plastisol through a screen print or a heat-pressed transfer. Rushing that step is how prints arrive tacky.

If your order is going somewhere with a rough final leg — a northern community, a job site, a ferry — say so. We'll pack it heavier. That's a five-second request that prevents a genuinely annoying problem, and it's the kind of thing you'd mention in person without thinking about it.

Open the box the day it lands, even if the event is three weeks out. Every option you have gets better the earlier you look — and if there is a problem, the time you have left to fix it is the only currency that matters.

• Count against the packing slip first. Quantities and the size breakdown, before anything else.
• Pull one shirt from each size and compare it to your mockup. Placement, print size, colour, spelling.
• Look at the print edges under decent light. Clean edges, solid coverage, no cracking when you gently stretch the fabric.
• Feel the print. It should be dry and settled, never tacky.
• Photograph anything that looks wrong, in the box, before you unpack further. Photos plus a courier tracking number settle a shipping-damage claim quickly.

If something is off, phone 613-666-9292or email order@yayaprints.ca with the photos. Because your approved mockup is on file, the comparison is objective: either the shirts match what you signed off on or they don't. If we got it wrong, we reprint it — and if the calendar is tight we reprint on the fastest method that still looks right, which is usually DTF, since digital garment printing needs no screens and no per-colour setup.

Where we'll be straight with you: a print that matches an approved mockup but isn't what you pictured in your head is a different conversation, and so is a size spread you supplied yourself. That's exactly why the approval step exists, and why it's worth spending five careful minutes on it. Care after delivery matters too — washing printed shirts properly does more for how long they last than anything we do at the press.

We're on Eastern time. If you're in Vancouver, our afternoon is your late morning, and our day ends while yours is still going. That sounds like friction and mostly isn't, as long as you understand where it bites.

The place it bites is the daily courier pickup. A box handed over before the afternoon pickup starts moving that day. A box finished twenty minutes after it waits until the next business morning. For a West Coast customer, an email sent at 4pm Pacific lands in our inbox after hours — so if you're close to a deadline, send in your morning, not your afternoon. That one habit routinely buys a full business day.

The fix for everything else is boring and effective: a real person answers the phone at 613-666-9292(that's 613-666-YAYA), and email goes to order@yayaprints.ca where a named human — the same one on your job — replies. Not a chatbot, not a queue. If your question is "is this deadline realistic from Ottawa to Saskatoon," a two-minute call answers it far better than a form. You can also start from the quote request page and we'll come back to you.

One more thing worth knowing if buying Canadian matters to you: everything is decorated here, in our own shop, on our own equipment. That's a production claim, not a claim about where the blank garment was woven — the two are legally distinct under the federal Competition Bureau guidance on "Made in Canada" labelling, and we'd rather explain the difference than blur it. More on that in our piece on Canadian-made custom apparel.

If you happen to be nearby, skip the courier entirely. Free local pickup and free local delivery cover the National Capital Region — Ottawa, Kanata, Barrhaven, Nepean, Orléans, Stittsville and across the river in Gatineau. For a tight deadline, that hand-off is the fastest route there is: finished shirts go from our counter to your trunk with no transit step at all.

Everyone else gets the same shop, the same press and the same mockup process, just with a tracking number in the middle. Whether it's custom t-shirts, hoodies, staff uniforms or a broader custom clothing program, the file we print from and the standard we hold it to don't change because of your postal code.

And the no-minimum policy travels too. DTF and DTG have no minimum — we'll print and ship one shirt to Corner Brook if that's what you need. Screen printing has a practical floor of about six pieces because of the screen setup, and bulk pricing starts to bite around 50. If you want a broader look at ordering from anywhere in the country, our Canada-wide printing overview is the place to start, and the full service list shows what else can go in the same box.