When a print job goes wrong, the printer gets blamed. Sometimes that's right — bad registration, undercured ink, sloppy artwork prep. Most of the time it's not. The print is fine. The garment is wrong.

The five problems below come up on quote complaints almost every week. All five are usually fixable upstream — at the point where the buyer chooses the blank — before the printer ever touches a screen.

1. Dye migration on coloured polyester

The complaint: "The white logo on our navy sports tees has turned pink."

What happened: polyester dye migrated through the ink layer during curing. This is a chemical reaction, not a print error. Disperse dyes in coloured polyester turn back to gas at curing temperatures, pass through the still-soft ink, and bond into the visible top layer.

The garment-side fix: don't pick deep-coloured 100% polyester for screen-printed designs that need clean white or pale colours. Light poly bases, blends with cotton, or natural cotton are all easier substrates. If the brief requires polyester for performance reasons, sublimation or a poly-rated transfer is the right method instead of screen print.

The print-side fix exists — barrier inks, low-temp curing systems, polyester-specific plastisol — but it adds cost and lead time. The garment-side fix is cheaper.

2. Cracked print on a stretchy fabric

The complaint: "The print on our women's fitted tees is cracking after a few washes."

What happened: standard plastisol screen print ink cures into a flexible-but-not-elastic film. On a fabric with high stretch — modal, viscose, or anything with significant spandex content — the fabric recovers more aggressively than the ink can stretch with it. The ink film cracks at the points of maximum stretch (chest, side seams, anywhere the fit is most fitted).

The garment-side fix: pick a fabric that doesn't have the elasticity to break the print. 100% cotton fitted tees have shape but limited stretch. Cotton-spandex blends below 5% spandex print fine. Above 5%, you need an elastic ink system or a different decoration method (DTG handles stretch better than screen print; embroidery doesn't stretch at all and is the wrong tool for stretchy fabrics).

The honest version: if the cut requires the fabric to stretch, screen print is going to crack eventually. The conversation should be about how long "eventually" needs to be.

3. Patchy print on a heather blend

The complaint: "Our print looks blotchy on the heather grey tees but fine on the solid colours."

What happened: heather fabrics are made by mixing dyed and undyed yarns at the spinning stage, which means the surface texture is microscopically uneven. Standard ink lays down evenly on a uniform surface — solid black, solid white, solid red. On heather, the dyed yarn shows through some sections of the print and not others, producing what looks like patchy coverage but is actually fabric inconsistency rendered visible by the ink layer.

The garment-side fix: for heather blends, use a more opaque ink system or a base layer of white before the colour. Better still — if the design tolerates it — use a solid garment instead of heather. Heather looks great on a finished tee but it's not the printer's friend.

The exception: dark prints (black, deep navy) on heather grey tees actually look fine because the ink overpowers the fabric texture. The patchy effect is most pronounced when light colours are printed onto heather or when designs have fine line work.

4. Embroidery puckering on thin fabric

The complaint: "Our embroidered logo looks great when the tees arrive but the fabric around it is wavy after the first wash."

What happened: embroidery puts thousands of stitches into a small area of fabric. Each stitch pulls slightly. On a heavyweight, dense knit, the fabric can absorb that pull and stay flat. On a lightweight or thin-knit tee — anything below about 180 gsm — the fabric distorts around the stitching, and washing accelerates the distortion.

The garment-side fix: don't embroider thin fabric. Use a heavier blank for any garment that needs embroidery — 180 gsm minimum, 200+ gsm for designs with high stitch counts. If the brief specifies a lightweight fashion-cut tee, switch the decoration to screen print or DTG. Embroidery wants weight under it.

This applies to polos too. A 160 gsm performance polo embroidered with a four-colour logo will pucker. A 220 gsm cotton-blend polo handles the same logo without complaint. The fabric weight question matters more for embroidery than for any other decoration method.

5. Shrinkage that throws off the print position

The complaint: "We measured the print position carefully on the sample but the production run came back with prints sitting too low."

What happened: the garment shrank in curing or in first wash, and the print — locked in place at curing time — moved relative to the new fabric position. Cotton tees that aren't pre-shrunk can lose 5–8% of their length on first wash. A print positioned 8 cm below the collar at production becomes a print sitting 12 cm below the collar after the first wash, which is enough to look obviously wrong.

The garment-side fix: order pre-shrunk blanks. Most quality brands now use compaction or sanforising processes that lock in shrinkage at the mill — a tee that's marked "pre-shrunk" or "ringspun pre-shrunk" will hold its dimensions through curing and washing. Cheaper unbranded blanks often skip this step, and the savings get eaten by print position complaints.

The other fix is to measure print position from a reference point that scales with shrinkage — usually a fixed distance from the bottom hem rather than from the collar. But this is a print-side workaround for a garment-side problem. Better blanks make it unnecessary.

The pattern across all five

What ties these together is that the buyer made a garment choice for one reason — cost, fashion, performance, look — and then expected the print to behave as if the garment choice didn't affect it. It does.

The conversation that prevents most of these is the one that happens at quoting. A printer who's worked with the substrate before knows what to expect, knows what to flag, and knows when to push back on a brief that's setting up failure. A printer who quotes the same way regardless of substrate is the printer whose work shows these problems six weeks later.

If you're getting a quote and the printer hasn't asked about fabric weight, base colour, fit, or use case, those questions matter more than the per-piece price. Print on the wrong garment costs the same as print on the right one. The difference shows up later.

Where this stops being a print problem

Two situations where the print problem isn't actually a printer's fault and isn't actually a garment problem either — it's a brief problem.

The first: the brief calls for a decoration method that doesn't fit the use case. A four-colour photographic design on a 50-piece order is going to either be expensive (screen print with full colour separations) or thin (DTG without setup costs but with shorter durability). A printer can do either competently. Neither one is wrong. The brief is asking for a result that doesn't match the run length.

The second: the brief specifies a fabric for one reason that conflicts with the decoration the brief also wants. Polyester for performance, full-bleed photographic print, durability through 50+ wash cycles — pick two. There isn't a method that does all three on coloured polyester at scale. The honest answer is to compromise on one, which means having the conversation before the order goes in.

Most decoration problems aren't decoration problems. They're brief problems that the decoration revealed. Catching them at the quote stage is cheaper than catching them at the wash stage.

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