What happens if a jersey is damaged during personalization?

Anyone releasing a lot of garments to a vendor is really asking a narrower question: if something goes wrong under the platen, who absorbs it, and how will I find out? Below is the whole answer in the order it plays out on a job — prevention first, then classification, cost, replacement, and the record.

Six things people mean by "damaged"

The word covers failures with very different causes and very different remedies, so the first job is to stop treating them as one clause in an agreement.

Failure	What it looks like	Root cause
Scorch or glazing	Yellowed patch or a shiny platen impression around the print	Temperature or dwell above what the fabric tolerates
Adhesion failure	A corner or edge lifting after the garment cools	Insufficient pressure, short dwell, or a coated fabric finish
Dye migration	Garment color bleeding up into a light-colored name or numeral	Reactive dyes in the polyester moving under heat
Ghosting	An existing printed graphic shadowing through near the new print	Sublimated artwork reactivating under the platen
Misapplication	Wrong spelling, wrong digits, crooked or off-center placement	Operator or intake error
Handling damage	A tear, a snag, a mark picked up in staging or transport	Physical handling, not heat

Only the last two are human. The first four are properties of a specific fabric meeting heat, which is why almost all of our damage policy is really a testing policy.

The pre-press test does most of the work

No lot goes into a live run untested. We press samples from that exact lot at controlled settings to establish three numbers — the temperature the fabric tolerates, the dwell it needs, and the pressure that seats a transfer without flattening the knit — and to watch for the two behaviours you cannot see coming: migration and ghosting.

This is why we ask for samples from the same production lot rather than the same style number. Two jerseys can be visually indistinguishable and respond differently because their fabric was woven and finished on separate runs. A style number tells you what it looks like; a lot tells you how it behaves.

A lot that fails does not get pressed. You hear about it before a pallet moves, and the discussion becomes a garment-selection discussion rather than a damage discussion. Declining a lot costs a phone call. Discovering the same fact live costs inventory, and it costs it with people watching.

Who absorbs the cost

Our error

A scorch at settings we chose, a transfer applied crooked, a name pressed that does not match the ticket, a garment marked in our staging — that is our cost, and it is not argued on the day. Where the unit came from our stock we replace it; where it is yours, it is credited against the invoice at the value you carry it at, which you tell us up front rather than after the fact.

Guest or roster error

A guest who types their own surname wrong, or a roster line that arrives misspelled, produces a garment that is technically perfect and commercially useless. Those are covered by a reprint allowance written into the agreement before the event, so the crew can simply fix it and move on instead of finding a decision-maker mid-queue. Beyond the allowance, reprints run at cost of goods. Both sides of that line get logged either way.

Latent garment defect

Occasionally a lot passes its test and a small number of units still behave badly — a bad panel, an inconsistent coating, a mill variance inside one carton. Nobody caused that. We stop, document it, tell you immediately, and decide together whether the remainder of the lot is still safe to run. What we do not do is quietly keep pressing and let the count sort itself out at teardown.

Replacement is a different problem for your goods

If the blanks came from us, a replacement is inventory: we carry adult XS–3XL and swap the unit at the counter. If the jerseys are yours, we cannot manufacture a replacement, and no policy language changes that. The practical protection is a buffer — a small overage on the popular sizes, held aside and counted separately, so a damaged unit becomes a swap rather than a person leaving empty-handed.

We raise buffer stock during planning for exactly this reason, and it is cheap insurance next to the cost of a size running short at hour two of a live line.

What gets written down, and when

• Every damaged unit is logged the same day with the cause, the lane, and the ticket it belonged to.
• Your on-site contact is told when it happens, not at the end of the event.
• Teardown produces a reprint and damage log alongside the counted-out inventory.
• You receive the full intake export — every name, number, size, and location applied — which is what reconciles a disputed count months later.

How client-supplied garments are handled end to end →   What the QC pass actually checks →   The handover checklist →