Custom T-Shirt Printing in Montreal: Costs, Turnaround and How to Order

Start with the honest part: there is no YAYA Prints storefront in Montreal. We are a print shop in Ottawa, and every Montreal order moves as files and boxes. If you need to walk in this afternoon, hold three blanks and leave with a sample, we are the wrong shop — better to read that in the first paragraph than find out on day three.

What you get instead is a shop that owns the presses. Screen printing, DTF, DTG and embroidery all happen in one building in Ottawa, which means the person answering your email can physically walk to the machine your shirts are on. Nothing is drop-shipped from overseas, and nobody has to email a vendor to find out where your order is.

The second thing that matters is the border, or rather the absence of one. Ottawa to Montreal is a domestic shipment: no customs broker, no duty at the door, no parcel stuck in clearance while your event date passes. Production runs 2–5 business days after you approve the mockup and pay, and transit into Greater Montreal is typically another 1–2 days.

That covers the island and everything around it: Plateau-Mont-Royal, Verdun, NDG, Westmount, LaSalle, Saint-Laurent, Dorval and Pointe-Claire in the west, Laval to the north, and Longueuil and Brossard across the bridge on the South Shore. The courier picture is the same for all of them.

We work with customers in English and French, so write your brief in whichever language you think faster in. Two ways in from here: build the shirt yourself in the free studio and see your price as you go, or send the quote form and let a person put it together for you.

This is the part of a Quebec apparel order that has nothing to do with printing and everything to do with whether the shirt is right. The moment your garment says something in French, the artwork picks up a failure mode that English-only shirts never hit: the accent.

The font may not have the character.Plenty of display and novelty typefaces — especially free ones — are drawn with A–Z, 0–9 and a little punctuation, and nothing else. Set the word Café in one of those and you get a hollow box, a letter borrowed from a different typeface, or an e with the accent silently gone. The nasty version is that it looks fine on your screen, because your computer quietly substituted a system font the print file will not carry.

Capitals are worse than lowercase.A face may include é and still have nothing for É. And where the capital does exist, it is taller than every other letter on that line — so FIERTÉ or ÉCOLE will sit higher than the layout you eyeballed from the unaccented word, and can run into the top of the print area or a shoulder seam. If your headline is set in all caps, that one accent decides the whole vertical placement.

Small accents and the wrong process do not mix.In embroidery, an acute accent at a quarter of an inch is two or three stitches, and a cedilla under a small ç fills in as a blob — so a French tagline on a cap or a left chest usually needs to be set larger than the English equivalent, not the same size. Cut vinyl has the opposite problem: every accent is a separate floating piece to weed, and the small ones lift first. Screen printing and DTF handle accents cleanly, provided they made it into the file that got separated. If you are deciding between stitched and printed, our embroidery page covers where thread is the better answer.

The same care applies around the accents: the apostrophe in L'Original, the œ in cœur, the guillemets in « quoted » copy, and the hyphens in Plateau-Mont-Royal or Pointe-Claire that a layout program will happily break in the wrong place.

What to send us.Two things: the artwork at the highest resolution you have, and the exact text typed out in the email, accents and all. That second one costs you ten seconds and lets us compare the printed layout against your string character by character. If the design came out of a design program, outline the fonts before you export the PDF — that turns letters into shapes and removes the substitution risk entirely. There is more on this in our guide to preparing logo files for printing, and if all you have is a small web image, our vectorization service rebuilds it as clean vector art.

In the studio, the text tool ships with a print font library, and you see immediately whether the face you picked carries the accent you need, because it renders on the mockup before you pay. If it does not, switch faces or tell us and we will set that line by hand. Bilingual layouts have one more quirk worth planning for: the French line almost always runs longer than the English one, so build the composition around the longer of the two. If you would rather read all of this in French, we have a guide to l'impression de t-shirts personnalisés written that way.

One thing we will not do is tell you what your copy legally has to say. We are printers, not lawyers — if your garment text has to satisfy a language requirement, get that from someone qualified. We will set whatever text you give us, in either language, and make sure it prints exactly as written.

Every order gets reviewed by a human designer before it goes to press. Someone on the team opens your file and checks resolution at the size it will actually print, colour against the garment you chose, and the sizing and placement of the graphic on the specific product. Then they either fix it or tell you plainly what is wrong with it.

The distinction we care about is that this is not an automated preflight. Automated checks pass files that are technically valid and practically wrong. A French word with the accent dropped is a perfectly valid string of characters. A 400-pixel logo dragged up to a twelve-inch front print is a perfectly valid image — it will just come out soft, and you find out when the box arrives. A person catches both in fifteen seconds.

So send whatever you have. A phone screenshot, a PNG pulled off your own website, a PDF from a designer you used two years ago, or an image you generated with an AI tool — we clean it up or redraw it as vector artwork and show you the result on a mockup before any payment. If you are working from an AI image, read whether an AI-generated logo can actually be printed first, and if you are wondering whether you need to hire someone at all, we wrote about when a graphic designer is worth it.

The mockup is free and it comes before money. You see the artwork on the real garment colour at the real placement, and nothing goes near a press until you approve it. That is why we are comfortable pushing people to lay out their own shirt online — self-serve design is only safe when a professional still checks the file afterwards.

Two numbers decide this almost every time: how many shirts, and how many colours in the design. Everything else is a tiebreaker.

Screen printing pushes thick ink through one stencilled screen per colour. It starts around 6 pieces, because the screens have to be burned and set up no matter how many shirts you run, and it becomes the clear best value past roughly 24 to 50 pieces. It also lays the brightest, most opaque ink of any method on a dark garment.

DTF and DTG have no minimum at all— we will print one shirt, and the per-piece price does not jump because you only wanted one. Both print unlimited colours, gradients and photographs at the same price as a one-colour logo, and neither carries a setup fee. If you want the two heavyweights compared properly, we have a full breakdown of DTF versus screen printing.

If you are somewhere in the middle — thirty shirts, say — the artwork breaks the tie. A flat two-colour logo screen prints beautifully at that count; an illustration with fifteen colours in it does not, and should go digital.

The shirts change but the buyers repeat, and each type has its own trap worth naming.

Festivals and events. Summer in Montreal is one long run of festivals, markets and street events, and each one needs crew shirts that read from across a crowd. Two lessons: bold and simple beats detailed, because nobody reads a fine-line logo from ten metres, and order a buffer of L and XL, because volunteer lists change the week of. Our event shirt page goes through the planning side.

Restaurants, cafés and bars. Front-of-house tees, aprons and caps, almost always with some French on them. These get reordered in small batches as staff turn over, which is exactly where no-minimum DTF beats a bulk screen run you have to store in a back room. Aprons and restaurant uniforms usually get ordered together.

Construction and the trades. Crews from Laval to the South Shore buy hi-vis, work tees and workwear where durability outranks softness. Company names with accents are common here, and are the single most frequent place we catch a dropped character. There is a Quebec-specific rundown in custom workwear and uniforms in Quebec.

Student associations and school teams.Budget-driven and volume-driven, usually organised by one person collecting sizes while a committee argues about the design. Screen printing at 50 or 100 pieces is what makes the per-person number work, and the hardest part is never the printing — read how to organise a group apparel order before you send the first message in the chat.

Small brands and merch. A first run of tees and hoodies for a market or a show. Here the blank matters more than the graphic, because people are paying for it rather than being handed it — start with ringspun cotton and print smaller quantities more often until you know what sells.

Anyone quoting one number without seeing the job is guessing. Price moves with the blank, the method, the colour count, the number of print locations and the quantity, and those five inputs can swing the same order by a factor of three. Here is the honest shape of it.

A basic screen-printed tee on a standard cotton blank runs roughly $12–$18 each at 50 pieces, and drops under $10 each once you are ordering in the hundreds. Full-colour DTF sits slightly higher per piece than a big screen run, but it carries no setup fee at all— so for ten shirts, the DTF total is typically well below what screen printing the same job would cost. That is the whole trade: screen printing has a cost floor and a low ceiling, digital has no floor and a nearly flat line.

We do not publish a fixed rate card, and you should be a little suspicious of shops that do, because two quotes are only comparable if they are for the same blank. Ask for the brand, style number and fabric weight before you put two numbers side by side.

Every quote is free and includes a mockup. If your budget is tight, the lever to pull is colours, not garment quality — a clean one-colour print on a decent shirt beats a four-colour print on a thin one. The other lever is quantity: going from 24 to 50 pieces often moves the per-shirt price more than any other decision you can make.

Two separate clocks, and mixing them up is how deadlines get missed. Production is 2–5 business days, starting only after both things have happened: you approved the mockup, and you paid. Transit to Greater Montreal is typically another 1–2 days. Plan on about a week from approval, and work backwards from your in-hands date rather than forwards from today.

The advantage of ordering from within Canada is unglamorous and real: no customs, no duty, no brokerage fee, and no parcel sitting in clearance while your event happens without its shirts. An overseas print-on-demand site can look cheaper on the product page and then cost you the whole reason you ordered. Everything we print is decorated in-house in Ottawa and shipped domestically, whether it goes to Dorval, Pointe-Claire, Saint-Laurent, LaSalle, or over the bridge to Laval, Longueuil and Brossard. The logistics of it are covered in more depth in shipping custom apparel across Canada.

Rush is available on most apparel jobs. If your date is genuinely immovable — a festival weekend, an opening, a tournament — say so before you order rather than after, and we will tell you honestly whether it is realistic.

Worth being clear on the one exception: free local pickup and delivery apply to Ottawa–Gatineau only. Montreal orders ship. That is the trade you are making, and in exchange you get in-house production, a free mockup before you spend anything, and a designer who answers.

The quickest way to get a Montreal order moving is not to email us. It is to open the free design studio and build the shirt. There is no account to create and no deposit to leave. You upload a logo, drop it onto a real garment in the colour you actually want, add text in print-quality fonts, set your sizes and quantities, watch the price update as you change things, and order from the same page.

1. Pick the garment and colour first.It changes how the art has to be built — white elements must genuinely be white in the file, not background showing through.
2. Upload your art, or set text. PNG, JPG, SVG or PDF. If you are typing French copy, check the accents render on the mockup before you go further.
3. Place it and size it. Left chest, full front, back or sleeve, with an on-screen print zone showing where the printable area ends.
4. Enter sizes and quantities. The price moves live, so you can test what 50 pieces does to your per-shirt number before committing.
5. Send it through, then wait for the proof. A human designer reviews the file and sends back a free mockup on the real garment. Nothing prints until you approve it.

We push this route rather than a phone call because it removes the slowest step in the process: the artwork arrives already attached to the order at the size and placement you meant, with no round of "can you send that again, bigger?" And it costs you nothing in quality, because the human review happens either way.

If you would rather not touch a design tool, that path never closes. Email order@yayaprints.ca or call 613-666-9292 with whatever file you have, in English or French, and we will build the mockup for you.

Almost every delayed order in this trade is delayed upstream of the press. Settle these six things and nearly any timeline works.

• The original artwork, at the highest resolution you have, with a transparent background if it is a PNG — not a screenshot of it.
• Any French copy typed out exactly, accents included, so it can be checked character by character against the layout.
• The size breakdown and total count, with a buffer of the sizes people always need more of.
• The garment and its colour, since that decides how the art is built.
• Your in-hands date, not your "would be nice" date — then work backwards through transit and production.
• One person who can approve the mockup. An approval sitting unread in a group chat is the most common reason a job misses its date.

Where we land: in-house Canadian production, no minimum on DTF or DTG, a free mockup before a dollar changes hands, English and French, and a real person who will tell you when the answer is no. Whether it is eight printed tees for a pop-up in Verdun or two hundred for a festival on the Plateau, the process is identical — and it starts with a mockup you did not pay for.

Two more Montreal reads: t-shirt printing near me in Montreal covers the local search side, and judging the best custom t-shirt printing in Montreal gives you criteria to compare shops with, ours included. When you are ready, send the free quote request or just start building the shirt.