For print and production
Studio teams brief artwork on a calibrated monitor in a colour-managed room. The press runs four colours of plastisol on a 100% cotton blank in an unheated Yerevan workshop in February. The distance between those two facts is where most corporate merch programmes fail. This page is written for the people who close that distance.
Roughly one piece in five that reaches a screen shop cannot be run as supplied. Not because the designer did a bad job, but because the file was authored for a different process. A vector logo built for a CorelDraw sheet in Pantone 185 C is a legitimate file and a poor screen separation. It has one colour, so the press has to make a decision the designer never authorised: which CMYK build gets used, and what happens to the thin strokes in the 40 pt subline underneath.
The classic corporate merch failure is a two-colour mark where one of the colours is a metallic. Pantone 872 C and 871 C are spot colours with real reflectance values, and they behave on screen like a dull yellow or a flat olive. When the separation splits the mark into four process inks, the metallic disappears and what is left is a colour nobody signed off. The press does not have a way to fix that. It can either run it as four inks and accept the shift, or stop the run and ask.
Second failure, second frequency: total ink coverage. Process screen printing tops out around 280-320% total ink coverage before the ink starts to starve on the substrate and the image goes flat or the screens clog. Illustrator happily lets you place a 340% black over a 200% cyan. The RIP will let it through. The press will either reject the separations or print a patch that looks like wet tar. This is why every artwork file we receive gets a coverage check before anything else happens.
Third failure, and the one that costs the most money: stroke weight below 1.5 pt. On a 140-180 mesh screen with a 0.11-0.15 mm emulsion, a thin stroke breaks up into a dotted line. The file looks correct on screen at 3000 px wide. On the garment it looks like the designer ran out of ink halfway through a word. Below 0.5 pt it disappears entirely. The brand team does not usually know this, because nobody has ever shown them the threshold.
Fourth failure, and the most embarrassing: bleed. Corporate artwork is typically drawn on a canvas matching the print area, because that is how it looks on screen. Screen printing does not clip like a printer. Anything that touches the edge of the design needs 2-3 mm of overflow, and anything that goes off the garment needs the full garment outline as a trim line. A design drawn tight to a 280 × 360 mm panel will print with a white hairline around three sides.
A clean handoff from a studio team is a vector file (AI, EPS or PDF with fonts embedded or outlined), a spot colour list with the Pantone references stated explicitly, the physical print size in millimetres, and a separate file for any knockout or reversed variant. That is the ideal. The more common handoff is a PNG at 300 dpi plus a PDF of the deck the design was drawn in.
We take both. What we cannot take is a screenshot, a JPEG of the logo from a website, or an AI-generated raster used as a source for a screen separation. Raster sources over 150 mm wide drop below the effective resolution of a screen mesh and will look soft in a way that shows up under raking light on a cotton blank.
AI, EPS and print-ready PDF are all workable. So is an InDesign or Illustrator file with fonts embedded, and a Figma or CorelDraw export where the type has been converted to outlines. The trouble starts when the file was assembled by someone who never asked whether it would be printed: live text with no font installed on the machine that opens it, a gradient mesh that flattens into banding at 150 mm, a photo scaled up beyond its native resolution, a shape knocked out of a group but not out of the layer beneath it.
The knockout case is the one that costs a run. An overprint trap will be invisible on screen and will leave a visible dark line around the knocked-out shape once it is printed, because overprint traps blend the knocked-out area with the ink underneath. It reads as a dirty edge. On a two-colour mark with a lot of knocked-out type, this can be the difference between a garment that looks designed and one that looks like it has a printing fault.
A practical habit that costs nothing: send the file as a PDF with fonts embedded, not as a link to a working folder. Working folders move, get renamed, and get opened on a machine that does not have the fonts. We would rather open the same file twice and get the same result than open it once and get a substituted typeface in the wordmark.
Screen printing runs at roughly 1 500 pieces per week per press in our Yerevan workshop, laser at about 10 000 pieces per week, and DTG from single pieces upward. Lead time is 7-25 working days depending on method and quantity, and the range is wide because the same week can contain a 200-piece cotton run that finishes comfortably and a 60-piece four-colour run that needs two drawdown rounds and a colour revision.
What matters for a production team's planning is that the queue position is decided at artwork release, not at order confirmation. A run whose artwork is approved on Monday can usually leave within the week. A run approved on Friday often leaves the following week because the screens have to be exposed, cured and washed first. If you need a date you can promise to a client, give us the artwork date, not the order date.
Four production stages, run by people who have set up screens rather than people who only operate a plotter. Each stage produces a physical artefact that can be signed off, not a preview on a screen.
We run a written preflight report before quoting: stroke weights, overprint and knockout traps, total ink coverage per separation, colour space declaration, bleed against the trim outline, dieline integrity, font status, and whether the design will run on the method specified. The report comes back within one working day and it names the specific fix for each finding rather than a generic "artwork issues" line.
Spot colours stay spot. Process artwork is separated once, tuned against the substrate, and confirmed on a physical drawdown before the screens are burned. For a four-colour mark on a dark cotton blank, the drawdown is the moment where everyone in the room finally agrees on what the logo looks like. On white it looks fine. On navy it is a different colour.
GSM, yarn type, blend and colour depth determine whether the ink sits on top or soaks in. 100% ring-spun cotton at 180-200 gsm takes a crisp print and discharges cleanly. A 60/40 poly-cotton at 160 gsm will pill and will not take a water-based ink without a plastisol underbase. We hold the actual blanks, cut and inspect them, and tell you which ones we will not run.
Every new setup is proofed on the production blank before the full run, not on paper. Cure temperature and dwell time are logged per run because a plastisol under-cure will crack inside two months and a water-based over-cure will stiffen the hand. Approval is taken on a washed sample where the garment will be washed, not on a fresh one.
The Pantone Solid Coated book is an ink, not a colour. Each chip is a specific ink formulation on a specific coated stock, and it is designed to predict what comes off a litho press. It does not predict a screen-printed plastisol deposit on cotton, and it certainly does not predict a discharge print, where the ink is removed from the garment rather than added to it. Expect a visible shift. Budget for the physical drawdown rather than trying to argue the file into compliance.
Substrate changes the result more than the ink does. A 100% cotton dark navy tee, a 60/40 poly blend in the same navy, and a recycled polyester in that navy are three different substrates. Each takes ink differently, each has a different surface sheen, and each shifts the printed colour by a visible amount. We run the drawdown on the actual blank because it is the only measurement that means anything.
On the studio side, the practical fix is to stop specifying Pantone references for merchandise and start specifying intent: a dark brand blue that reads as navy rather than black on a dark garment, or a light version for dark stock. Our prepress step produces a substrate swatch card per programme, which lets a studio team choose from what the press can actually hold rather than from what a book says should be possible.
Screen MOQ sits at 50-100 pieces per design per colour, and the reason is arithmetic. A 40 × 50 cm screen costs what it costs to make, and the ink setup is 12 000-18 000 AMD per screen. At 50 pieces that setup is 240-360 AMD per piece of fixed cost before a single drim of ink goes down. Below 50 the setup dominates and the unit price becomes indefensible in a quote comparison.
That is why we push studios toward DTG below 50 pieces. DTG has no screen setup, MOQ starts at 1, and lead time is 3-5 working days. The per-piece cost is higher and the hand-feel of the print is different, but for a 20-piece run of a complex multi-colour design, DTG is usually the correct answer and screen printing is usually the wrong one. We will say so in the quote, even when the screen setup fee would be better for our margin.
The other lever is colour count. A one-colour design at 200 pieces is cheap. A four-colour design at 200 pieces pays four setups. Consolidating two of those colours into a spot screen, or moving to a two-colour mark with a knockout instead of a four-colour gradient, frequently removes 20-40% from the unit cost without anyone noticing on the finished garment. This is a prepress conversation, not a negotiation, and it belongs at the artwork stage.
Studio sends vectors or a raster source plus the Pantone or colour intent list. We return a written preflight report with named findings and specific fixes inside one working day. If the report comes back with only blockers, the artwork never enters the queue and nothing has been charged.
Spot separations confirmed, screens burned, and a drawdown produced on the production blank in the actual ink sequence. This is the last point at which a colour decision is free. After the drawdown is approved, changing the ink build means new screens and a new setup fee.
A full-size proof is pulled on the actual blank, cured on the production oven, and washed once. Registration, coverage, hand-feel and colour shift are assessed on the washed sample. If the garment will be washed in real life, it gets approved washed.
The run is executed at 1 500 pieces per week capacity for screen printing, with cure parameters logged per run. QC samples are pulled at intervals and held back for you to inspect against the approved proof before the balance is shipped.
Sometimes, and we will tell you at preflight whether that is the case. It works when the file has embedded or outlined fonts, no sub-1.5 pt strokes, explicit Pantone references, bleed on all sides, and a colour count the method can carry. It does not work when the source is a raster, when a metallic is specified, or when total ink coverage exceeds about 300%. In those cases we either adjust the file inside the tolerances a production shop would normally apply, or we flag it and you decide.
No, not exactly, and any vendor that guarantees it is either lying or charging you for a proof you will reject. Screen printing lays down a thicker deposit than offset litho, cotton absorbs differently from coated stock, and a plastisol sits on the surface with a different sheen. What we do guarantee is a substrate drawdown approved before the run, a physically consistent ink batch within your tolerance, and a written note if a colour had to shift to stay printable.
50 pieces per design per colour for screen printing, 50-100 for DTF, 25-50 for sublimation, and 1-10 for DTG. Below 50 on a screen the setup cost of 12 000-18 000 AMD per colour dominates the unit price and we will recommend DTG instead. We will tell you when that switch is cheaper, because a quote you cannot defend to procurement is not a quote.
No. Corp-Merch is an independent print and production operation. We are not a partner, accredited supplier, licensee or authorised distributor of FOGRA, Pantone, any ink manufacturer, or any garment brand. We hold an ICC-based colour workflow and run our own preflight and drawdown procedures as an independent production practice. Any reference to a standards body on this page describes a published specification, not a relationship.
Yes, and we recommend it for anything printed on a dark or dark-blend garment. We run a wash cycle on the approved proof using the care instruction that will actually apply, plus a hand rub test on the cured print. Results come back as a physical sample with a note, not as a rating. If the print fails, we change the ink system rather than re-running the same cure cycle, because under-cure and adhesion are different problems with the same visible symptom.
We handle multi-colour logos on dark garments routinely, including water-based discharge on 100% cotton and plastisol underbase on blends. What we will not do is pretend a four-colour build with a metallic is reproducible at 50 pieces without a colour shift. If the design is that complicated, the honest options are a two-colour build with a knockout, a two-position print, or switching that item to embroidery or DTG. All three are cheaper at low volume and look better.
Corp-Merch is an independent print and production operation in Yerevan and Vanadzor. We are not a partner, sponsor, accredited supplier, licensee or authorised distributor of FOGRA, Pantone, any ink manufacturer, any garment brand, any bank or any event referenced on this page. Mentions of Pantone references, FOGRA specifications, ISO test methods or named programmes describe published standards and the kind of work we handle, not a commercial relationship or an accreditation. Where a programme exists, we may or may not be its supplier, and the relationship is a private commercial matter between the buyer and the vendor. We do not print another organisation's trademark or brand mark without a written licence from the rights holder.
Send the vector or raster source, the Pantone or colour intent list, the physical print size in millimetres, and the garment or substrate you have in mind. You get a written preflight report inside one working day, whether or not the programme goes ahead.