How to hire a jersey personalization vendor.

Plenty of shops own a heat press. Far fewer have run a queue of two hundred people who all want their own name on a back within the hour. The gap between those two groups is not equipment — it is process, and process is what you should be interviewing for. Here are the questions that surface it.

1. How is intake separated from application?

If the answer is "guests tell the operator at the press," stop there. A press that waits while somebody decides on a name is a press you are paying to idle. You want intake at tablet stations ahead of the counter, with each entry becoming a numbered ticket that arrives at the lane fully resolved.

2. How are jobs distributed across lanes?

Round-robin sounds fair and performs badly, because one awkward job stalls everything behind it. Distribution by least-pending-work keeps every lane busy and stops a backlog forming on one side of a build. Ask them to describe their queue board.

3. What is your operator-to-press ratio?

One operator per lane. If a vendor is quoting four presses and two people, they are quoting two lanes with extra hardware. That distinction matters enormously in the last hour of an event.

4. What is your character limit, and where is it enforced?

Any honest vendor will give you a number — ours is roughly nine characters for a name and one to three digits for a number. More importantly, ask where it is enforced. It should be at the intake tablet, so an over-length name is caught before a press cycle. A vendor who discovers it at the platen is going to hand somebody a squeezed-looking back.

5. Will you fabric-test our garments before the date?

If you are supplying the jerseys, this is the single most important question on the list. Polyester varies by mill; two jerseys that look identical can behave differently under a platen. A vendor who will not test samples from your lot for heat tolerance, dye migration, and sublimation ghosting is planning to find out on your inventory.

6. What is the reprint policy, in writing?

Two distinct cases. Their error — a correct ticket pressed wrong — should be their cost, full stop. A guest's own typo should come out of a stated reprint allowance in the quote, then at cost of goods. Get both in the agreement rather than discovering the position at teardown.

7. What comes back to us at the end of the day?

A count of units personalized. A reprint log with causes. Remaining inventory by size. Documented damage. An export of what was applied to what. If a vendor cannot describe their handover, they do not have one.

8. How are setup and teardown billed?

They are real hours and should appear as real hours. A quote that hides load-in inside a vague "day rate" is a quote you cannot compare with anyone else's. Ours bills staffing at $250 per hour across setup, live time, and teardown, itemized.

9. What happens when demand spikes?

Every venue has a shape to its demand — doors, halftime, after a final, the twenty minutes after a keynote. A vendor who plans flat coverage across the day either overcharges you for idle lanes or under-serves the peak. Ask how they shift-plan against your schedule.

What a comparable bid must break out

Line	Why it matters
Lane count and crew size	Sets throughput ceiling; exposes bad operator ratios
Hours, split setup / live / teardown	The only way to compare two hourly rates honestly
Garment line	Client-supplied with a counted quantity, or sourced blanks with brand and size curve
Decoration method and location	Press, twill, or embroidery have different time and cost profiles
Art and layout prep	Should be a stated figure, not a footnote
Travel	Itemized; ours is $0 in OC, LA, and SD and $900 outside
Reprint allowance	Defines who pays for the inevitable

How we structure a quote →   Full cost breakdown →