Custom T-Shirts & Printing in Waterloo
We print custom apparel in Ottawa and ship it to Waterloo constantly: club gear, conference merch, startup swag, staff shirts. You can upload a logo to our free studio at yayaprints.ca/mockup-creator, drop it on a real garment, add print-quality text, pick colours and sizes, watch the price move and order online. Or send us the art and we'll build the mockup for you. Either way it's free and nothing prints until you approve it. We don't have a Waterloo storefront. We have an Ottawa press and a courier.
Design it yourself in seconds — a real designer still reviews every order before it prints.
Custom printing built for Waterloo.
Waterloo runs on two campuses and a lot of co-op terms, and the order book shows it. University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier clubs, faculty societies, residence councils and intramural teams order tees by the dozen, and orientation crews order them by the hundred. Startups and the tech and insurance employers around Northdale and the research park order onboarding hoodies, booth tees for conferences and giveaway totes. Uptown Waterloo shops, cafés and restaurants come to us for embroidered staff shirts and aprons. Hackathon organisers send us a logo built at two in the morning, and a human designer cleans it up before it prints, which is usually the whole difference between a crisp print and a blurry one.
Waterloo is mostly campus clubs and student groups ordering screen-printed tees in bulk, plus tech and insurance employers ordering embroidered hoodies, polos and conference merch.
Every custom-printing service, one shop.
Businesses we print for in Waterloo
Building and wayfinding signs, parking and safety signage, maintenance uniforms and tenant notices.
Coroplast lawn signs, canvassing door hangers and volunteer apparel for municipal campaigns — produced for mayoral and city-council races.
Small-batch printing, custom neck labels, hang tags and stickers for independent labels and streetwear.
Hi-vis workwear, durable work shirts, and embroidered crew gear for Ottawa contractors and trades.
We also serve Hamilton, Waterloo Region & Southern Ontario
Custom printing in Waterloo — FAQ
Can I design something and order it without talking to a salesperson?
Yes. Go to yayaprints.ca/mockup-creator, upload your logo, drop it on the garment you want, add print-quality text, choose colours and sizes, and watch the price update as you go. Then order online. No account, no deposit, no phone call, no waiting for someone to email you back on Monday. If you'd rather we did it, send the artwork and the quantity and we'll build the mockup for free. Either way a human designer reviews the file before it goes to press, so the studio isn't a print-whatever-got-uploaded machine.
Can you do a small run for a club, a hackathon or a research group?
Easily. There's no minimum on DTF or DTG, so ten club shirts or a single sample before an exec meeting is completely normal here. Screen printing starts around six pieces and starts making real financial sense past 24 to 50, which is where most Waterloo and Laurier club orders land anyway. If you're weighing fifteen shirts now against fifty in the fall, send us both numbers and we'll show you what each works out to per shirt, so whoever signs the cheque has something concrete to look at.
We have a conference date. Can you rush it?
Often, yes. Rush is available on most apparel jobs. Normal timing is two to five business days of production after you approve the mockup and pay, then a day or two in transit from Ottawa, and rush compresses the production side. What we won't do is promise a delivery date and then quietly hope the courier cooperates. Tell us the day the boxes need to be in the room and we'll tell you, before you pay, whether that's realistic, which method gets there fastest, and what it costs to move up the queue.
Do you have a storefront in uptown Waterloo?
No. YAYA Prints is an Ottawa shop, one building with presses, embroidery machines and people in it, and we ship to Waterloo. There's no King Street location to drop into with a USB stick. In practice nothing about the job needs a counter: artwork comes by email or through the studio, the mockup comes back digitally, you approve it on your phone, and the boxes arrive by courier. If you want to talk to an actual person rather than fill in a form, 613-666-9292 is the number, and order@yayaprints.ca reaches us too.
Who actually checks the artwork before it prints?
A human designer, on every single order. They check resolution, colour, sizing and placement on the real garment, and either fix the file or tell you exactly what's wrong with it. It is not an automated preflight spitting out a warning code. Students send us logos built in Figma at screen resolution, screenshots off a phone, PDFs with the fonts missing, and AI-generated images with mush where the lettering should be. We clean those up, or redraw them as vector art, before anything hits a press. That step costs nothing and it's why prints come out sharp.
What does shipping cost, and will I get hit with duties?
No duties, no customs holds, no brokerage surprises. Everything is printed in Ontario and ships domestically, so your order never crosses a border. Shipping itself is quoted with the order based on weight and destination. A box of twenty tees costs very little to move from Ottawa to Waterloo, and the per-piece shipping cost keeps falling as the order grows, which is another reason bulk runs work out. You'll see the number before you pay, rather than discovering it at checkout on an overseas site three weeks after ordering.
Design it yourself. A human designer still checks every order.
Our free studio gives you the price and the mockup in the browser. What it doesn't do is print your file blindly — every order is reviewed by a real designer before it reaches the press.
- Step 1You design it — free
Upload your logo, drop it on a real garment, set the size and placement, pick colours and quantities. No account, no deposit, no waiting on a reply.
- Step 2A human designer checks it
Before anything prints, one of our designers opens your file and checks resolution, colours, sizing and placement. If it won't print well, we fix it or tell you exactly what's wrong — a person, not an automated preflight.
- Step 3You approve, then we print
You get the corrected mockup back on the actual product. Nothing goes to press until you say yes — and it ships in 2–5 business days.
Waterloo, let's make
something custom.
Design it yourself in our free studio and see the price as you go — or send your artwork and quantity and we'll come back with a free mockup, usually the same business day.
Either way, a real designer reviews your file before anything prints.