Custom Kids and Baby Apparel: Sizing, Safety and What Parents Actually Buy

Adult apparel has one axis. Someone tells you they are a large, you order a large, and the shirt fits well enough that nobody thinks about it again. Children's apparel has three complications stacked on top of each other, and every one of them causes real reprints.

First, there are two separate size systemsthat use different alphabets and meet awkwardly around age two. Second, the person ordering is almost never the person wearing — a coach, a teacher, a grandparent or a daycare director is guessing on behalf of thirty children they cannot measure. Third, and most under-appreciated, the target moves. A child ordered for in March is measurably bigger at the June event. Nothing equivalent happens with adult staff uniforms.

Add one more thing that only matters here: parents notice how a shirt feels. An adult will wear a stiff plastic-feeling print without comment. A four-year-old will pull at it, complain, and the shirt lives in a drawer. Softness is not a luxury detail on kids' apparel, it is whether the garment gets worn.

This guide covers the sizing first, because that is most of the problem, then the decoration decisions that actually differ from adult work. If you want the size chart, the scale drawings and an interactive finder in one place, they live on our custom kids and baby apparel page.

Infant bodysuits are sold by month — newborn, 6M, 12M, 18M, 24M — and the month is a convenient lie. What the manufacturer actually specced is a weight and a length. A 12M bodysuit fits a baby who is roughly 16 to 20 pounds and 26 to 28 inches long, whether that baby is seven months old or fourteen months old. Plenty of six-month-olds are in 12M. Plenty of one-year-olds are still in 6M. Neither is a mistake.

Here is the scale we work from, which comes from the blank manufacturers' body specs:

Two practical consequences fall out of that table. Newborn is a trap on a bulk order.The NB weight band has to cover a five-pound baby and an eleven-pound one, and it fits for a matter of weeks either way. Buy NB when you know the specific baby and the shirt is for a photo in the next month. For a group run — a hospital ward, a fundraiser, a shop's retail rack — 6M is the smallest size worth stocking in quantity.

And a gift onesie should almost always be a size up. A 6M given at a baby shower gets worn for a fortnight. A 12M gets worn all next summer, which is when the parent actually wants the photo.

Somewhere after two, sizing switches alphabet. Youth runs XS, S, M, L, XL, and those letters mean something completely different from the same letters on an adult rack. Youth XL is a twelve-to-thirteen-year-old. Youth medium is an eight-to-nine-year-old. If someone on your team says "medium" without saying which chart, you have not collected a size, you have collected an ambiguity.

Confusing things further, the old retail numbers never went away. Parents still shop by "a size 6" or "a 10-12", so most youth charts carry both readings:

Look at the last two columns and the youth-versus-adult confusion resolves itself. A youth XL is about 21.5 inches across the chest, which is close to an adult small — but its body is 28 inches long, cut for a torso that has not stretched out yet, and the shoulders are narrower. Above youth XL, order an adult small. A teenager put in a youth XL feels the difference immediately even though the tape measure nearly agrees.

The other lesson from the chart: height is a far better predictor than age. Two eight-year-olds can be four inches apart, and the shirt follows the body, not the birthday. That is exactly how the size finder on our kids and baby page is weighted — it will answer from an age alone, but tell it a height and the answer gets substantially more reliable. It also shows the alternate size next door and offers a room-to-grow setting that deliberately bumps you up one.

The single most common failure in a kids' group order is collecting letters instead of children. You send out a form asking for shirt sizes, parents write "M", and you get back a pile that means youth medium, adult medium and "whatever my kid wore last year" in unknown proportions.

Collect age and height, and publish the chart alongside the form. Ask for the size too, by all means — but the age and height are what let you catch the parent who ticked adult small for a seven-year-old. Our guide to running a group apparel order covers the collection mechanics; this is the kids-specific overlay on top of it.

Then account for the thing adults never force you to think about: the gap between the order and the event. Order in April for a June field day and the child grows through part of a size in between. Order team hoodies in September for a season that ends in March and some of them grow through a whole one. Parents under-order by one size with impressive consistency, because they are picturing the child in front of them today rather than at the finish line.

The rules of thumb we would give you over the phone:

• Between two sizes, take the larger.A kids' shirt that is a bit big gets worn for another year. One that is a bit small is worn once.
• Cotton shrinks about half a size.Expect roughly 3–5% length shrinkage on a cotton youth tee after a hot wash and a tumble dry. That is another reason to round up.
• Do not stock newborn in bulk. Start a group size run at 6M unless the order is for named babies.
• Add spares in the middle sizes. On a youth run, S and M carry most of the volume. A couple of extras there rescue the two families who reply late.
• Do not mix charts in one column.Write "Youth M" and "Adult M" in full on the roster, every time.

Runs that mix children and adults are routine here — a school with staff shirts and student shirts, a house league with player tees and coach hoodies. The same artwork goes on both; only the print scale changes. If your run needs names and numbers on the back, how to order names and numbers walks through collecting the roster without a spreadsheet disaster, and school spirit wear covers what schools typically buy.

This is the mistake we catch most often on kids' artwork, and it is not the customer's fault: design files are usually built once, at adult scale, and then dropped onto every garment in the order. A full-front adult print is around 11 inches wide. Put 11 inches on a 24M onesie whose entire chest panel is about 10.5 inches across when laid flat and the print does not just look big, it does not physically fit.

Sensible starting widths, which you should then judge by eye on the mockup:

Vertical placement matters just as much on the small sizes. A 12M bodysuit is about 12.5 inches from shoulder to hem, and the bottom of that is a snap gusset that curves and bunches. The usable print area sits high on the chest, which means tall artwork does not work: a two-line lockup or a wide, short badge sits far better on a onesie than a stacked crest.

The practical fix is to stop imagining it. Open the design studio, pick the onesie or the youth tee, drop your file on it and drag it to size — each garment carries its own print scale, so the same logo comes out proportionally smaller on the small sizes rather than the same physical size on everything. If you want the general rules behind chest logos before you start, our chest logo size guide has the adult numbers this table scales down from, and preparing logo files explains why a website PNG that looks fine on a phone often will not hold up at 8 inches.

For adult workwear, we usually pick a method by quantity and colour count. For kids' apparel there is a third input that outranks both on small runs: how the print feels against skin. A thick slab of plastisol on a 2T is a plastic plate on a torso that is only 14 inches long. It is durable, and it is the reason the shirt gets refused.

DTF and DTG are the two we reach for first here. DTG sprays water-based ink directly into cotton fibres, so there is essentially no hand feel at all — you cannot find the edge of the graphic with a fingertip. On a 100% cotton bodysuit or a soft youth tee, that is as good as it gets. DTF presses a thin full-colour film onto the garment; slightly more presence than DTG, but it holds bright colour on darks and on blends and fleece where DTG struggles. Neither has a minimum, so one onesie for one nephew is a real order.

Screen printing still wins on a big school or league run — it is the cheapest per piece once you are past roughly 50 shirts, and a soft-hand ink keeps it comfortable. Just be deliberate about it: ask for the softest ink the design allows, and keep the ink coverage modest rather than filling the whole chest with a solid block. Screen printing needs about 6 pieces to make sense at all, and really pays off past 24 to 50.

Embroidery is lovely on a youth hoodie — a stitched crest on fleece outlasts the garment and reads far more expensive than it costs. We do not recommend it on infant bodysuits. The stabilizer backing that holds the stitches makes a lightweight bodysuit stiff exactly where it lies against the skin, and thread has no business being the scratchiest thing a newborn is wearing. Print the babies, embroider the hoodies.

Fabric choice feeds into the same decision — which fabric prints best covers the cotton-versus-blend tradeoff, and it applies to kids' blanks the same way. For cooler months, a long-sleeve version of the same design is a common companion piece on school and camp orders.

Kids' clothing gets washed harder than anything else in the house. A team shirt goes through grass, juice and a hot cycle in the same week, repeatedly. That is worth designing around rather than discovering later.

The care that actually preserves a print is boring and effective: wash inside out, cold, tumble dry low or hang, skip the fabric softener, and never put an iron directly on the graphic. Fabric softener is the quiet one — it deposits a film that works against the print surface over time. How to wash a printed shirt goes through it properly, and it is worth pasting into the note that goes home with a class order. Expect that hot wash to take roughly 3–5% out of the length of a cotton youth tee, which is one more argument for rounding the size up.

One thing we are deliberately not going to tell you: whether a given blank meets any particular children's garment safety or sleepwear flammability requirement. We decorate finished blanks; we do not manufacture them, and the blank's manufacturer is the authority on its compliance. If you are buying for a regulated context — anything sold or supplied as sleepwear, or a programme with its own procurement rules — tell us before you order and check the requirement against the manufacturer's documentation for the specific style. We will tell you what blank a job is running on so you can do that. What we will not do is reassure you with a claim we are not in a position to make.

After a few hundred of these, the orders sort into a handful of recognisable shapes, and each has its own quirk worth knowing.

Baby showers and birth announcements. One or two onesies, usually a name or a date, sometimes a hospital-photo prop. This is the classic single-piece order and the reason a no-minimum shop matters. Size up: the 12M gets photographed all next summer.

Matching family sets.Reunions, holiday photos, first-day-of-school shirts, sibling announcements. The mechanical requirement is that the adult and the kids' garments come from the same colour range, or the photo shows two slightly different navies. Our kids' products share one palette across the onesie, the youth tee and the youth hoodie for exactly that reason.

Birthday shirts. A name and a big number, usually one or two pieces, usually needed sooner than is comfortable. Small full-colour runs are the fastest thing we do, but tell us the date up front rather than after ordering.

Daycares, preschools and camps. Often a matched set: staff in adult tees or polos, children in youth tees, sometimes toddlers in 24M. These orders live or die on the size roster, which is the section above.

Schools and spirit wear. Bigger runs, one design across a wide size spread, frequently with a fundraising margin built into the price. School spirit wear covers how those get structured.

Youth sports. House leagues, tournaments, practice tees, hoodies for the bench. Sports team apparel and our team apparel guide for Ottawa clubs go further, including names and numbers on youth cuts.

Baby onesies, youth tees and youth hoodies are all in the online studio alongside the adult range, so a kids' order does not need a phone call. Design it yourself for free: upload a logo or a photo, add text in print-quality fonts, drag it to size on the actual garment, pick your colour and your size breakdown, and watch the price move as the count changes. No account, no deposit, and you can order at the end of it. Matching adult and kids' pieces can go in the same order.

On price, treat any single number with suspicion — it moves with the garment, the method, the colours and the quantity, and our live prices are the ones the studio shows. As an indicative anchor, a screen-printed adult tee runs roughly $12–$18 each at 50 piecesand drops under $10 each in the hundreds; kids' garments use less fabric and generally sit at or below their adult equivalent, while a youth hoodie sits well above a youth tee. Full-colour DTF costs slightly more per piece than screen at volume but carries no setup at all, which is what makes small runs viable. Quotes are free and include a mockup, so for a real number on a real run, put the details into the quote form or build it in the studio and read the total.

Whichever route you take, a human designer reviews the file before it goes to press. A real person checks resolution, colour, sizing and placement, and either fixes the file or tells you exactly what is wrong — it is not an automated preflight that silently prints a blurry logo at 300% scale on a 24M. On kids' work that check earns its keep, because the scaling error described earlier is the single most common thing we intercept. Send a phone screenshot, a website PNG, a PDF or an AI-generated image; we clean it up or redraw it as vector.

Standard turnaround is 2–5 business daysafter you approve the free mockup and pay, with rush available on most apparel and 1–2 days of transit on top outside Ottawa–Gatineau. Everything is printed in-house in Ottawa and shipped Canada-wide, so nothing sits in customs. If you are still deciding what to buy, the kids and baby service page has the size finder, the full colour range and the current products in one place.