The Organizer Carries All the Blame

Why ordering T-shirts for your church, school, company, or sports team shouldn’t feel like a second job.

There’s an old saying that no good deed goes unpunished.

If you’ve ever volunteered to organize a group T-shirt order, you probably know exactly what that means.

Maybe you’re the church secretary who volunteered to order shirts for Vacation Bible School. Maybe you’re the team mom trying to get matching shirts for 75 baseball parents. Maybe you’re the office manager who got stuck ordering company shirts for the annual picnic.

Whatever your title, congratulations. You’ve just inherited a job that nobody wants, everybody has an opinion about, and somehow, when something goes wrong, it’s all your fault.

Welcome to being the organizer.

It Starts With a Simple Question

“Hey, can you order some shirts for everybody?”

Sounds easy enough.

Until you realize that “everybody” means 150 people, 12 different sizes, three people who want hoodies instead, somebody who wants a different color, and a handful of folks who swear they already paid you.

Now you’re collecting money through cash, checks, Venmo, and whatever else people decide to use. You’re keeping a spreadsheet of sizes, chasing down payments, and answering text messages at 10 o’clock at night.

And that’s before you’ve even ordered the shirts.

Then comes the delivery.

You’ve got six boxes of shirts spread across your living room floor, trying to figure out which shirt belongs to which person. Your kids are stepping over piles of clothing, the dog is sniffing everything, and somebody just texted to ask whether you ordered their extra large.

You did. Probably.

There has to be a better way.

The Problem Isn’t Printing Shirts. It’s Managing People.

Most screen printing companies can put ink on a T-shirt.

Some do it exceptionally well.

But printing a good shirt is only one part of a successful group order.

The real challenge is everything that happens before and after the printing.

Who collects the money? Who keeps track of the sizes? Who makes sure everyone understands what the finished product will look like? Who handles the orders? Who sorts everything when it arrives?

At many traditional print shops, those responsibilities fall squarely on the organizer.

And while a small home based decorator with a heat press might be a great option for a handful of custom shirts, producing an entire organization’s order is a different animal.

Printing dozens or hundreds of shirts individually can become expensive and time consuming. A one person operation may also have limited capacity to handle customer questions, design changes, production, packaging, and distribution.

There’s nothing wrong with running a small business from home. Every successful company started somewhere.

But when you’re responsible for shirts for an entire organization, you need more than somebody who can make a shirt.

You need a system that makes your job easier.

At Rhodes Printing, We Think the Organizer Has Enough to Worry About

We’ve been in the printing business since 1954, and we’ve learned something important along the way.

The person organizing the order usually isn’t getting paid to do it.

They’re volunteering their time, trying to make something good happen for their church, school, team, or company.

We think they deserve a little help.

That’s why we’ve developed a process that takes almost all the headaches out of group shirt ordering.

And it starts before a single shirt gets printed.

Everybody Gets to See Exactly What They’re Buying

One of the biggest sources of frustration in group shirt orders is mismatched expectations.

Someone imagines a giant logo across the front. Somebody else thinks the design will be small on the left chest. Another person thought the shirts were going to be navy instead of royal blue.

When the shirts arrive, suddenly everybody has an opinion.

And guess who gets to hear about it?

The organizer.

At Rhodes Printing, we work directly with the organizer to develop a digital proof of the finished product.

We offer unlimited revisions during the proofing process because we want the design to be right before we print anything.

Once the organizer is happy, that proof can be shared with the entire organization.

Everybody gets to see what the shirts will look like before placing an order.

No guessing. No surprises. No arguing afterward about what somebody thought they were getting.

We Build Your Organization Its Own Online Store. For Free.

Here’s where things get really good.

Once the artwork is approved, we create a custom online ordering website specifically for your organization.

And we don’t charge you to build it.

Instead of collecting cash, chasing checks, and keeping track of who has paid, you simply share the link with your group.

Each person visits the website, selects their items, chooses their sizes, and pays for their own order.

That’s it.

No collecting money.

No spreadsheets full of names and sizes.

No trying to remember whether Susan paid for two shirts or three.

And because the store displays the approved design, customers can see exactly what they’re ordering before they spend a dime.

The organizer gets to stop being the group’s unpaid accountant.

We Print Everything Together to Keep the Price Down

There’s a reason screen printing is such a good option for large groups.

The more shirts we print together, the more efficiently we can produce them.

Instead of making one shirt today, another tomorrow, and three more next Thursday, we collect the orders through your custom store and print everything together when the ordering period closes.

That allows us to take advantage of bulk production pricing while still letting each individual customer place and pay for their own order.

It’s the best of both worlds.

Individual ordering convenience with bulk printing efficiency.

Your Living Room Floor Is Officially Retired

Remember those six boxes of shirts spread across your living room?

We have good news.

You don’t have to do that anymore.

When your group order is complete, we can ship the individual orders directly to customers or deliver the entire order to your organizer for distribution at church, school, practice, or work.

And here’s the part organizers really love.

Every individual order is already packaged separately.

Each package has a packing slip identifying the customer and their order.

No sorting shirts into piles. No matching sizes to names. No wondering which medium belongs to which person.

Just read the name and hand over the package.

That’s it.

Your living room stays a living room.

What If Your Shirt Order Could Actually Make Money?

Now let’s talk about something even better.

What if your organization could raise money simply by selling the shirts it was already planning to order?

At Rhodes Printing, we offer a fundraising option through our custom online stores.

You choose how much money you want to raise on each item.

Maybe it’s $3 per shirt. Maybe it’s $5. Maybe it’s $10.

That’s entirely up to you.

We add your selected fundraising amount to the price of the merchandise, collect the payments, process the orders, and print the shirts.

When the fundraiser is complete, we give your organization a check for the money raised.

No collecting donations. No managing payments. No sorting through order forms.

Over the years, Rhodes Printing has written hundreds of thousands of dollars in fundraising checks to schools, churches, and other organizations.

Some of our most meaningful projects have involved communities coming together to support a child facing cancer or another serious illness.

We’ve seen what can happen when people rally around a family that needs help.

And we’re proud that something as simple as a T-shirt can play a part in making that happen.

Not All T-Shirt Companies Offer the Same Thing

When you’re shopping for group shirts, it’s tempting to compare companies based entirely on the price printed next to a shirt.

But that’s not always an apples to apples comparison.

One company might quote you a low price and leave you responsible for collecting money, organizing sizes, and distributing merchandise.

Another might produce shirts one at a time, making smaller orders convenient but larger orders more expensive. (We explain why in screen printing vs. heat press.)

At Rhodes Printing, you’re getting a full production team, professional screen printing equipment, experienced artwork assistance, and an ordering system designed specifically for organizations.

You’re also getting a company that’s been doing this for generations.

We aren’t suggesting that every group needs our level of service.

If you need two shirts for a family reunion, there are plenty of ways to get that done.

But if you’re responsible for 50, 100, 500, or even 1,000 shirts, the process matters just as much as the product.

And when you consider the hours spent collecting payments, organizing orders, answering questions, and sorting merchandise, the cheapest quote isn’t always the least expensive solution.

You Deserve to Enjoy the Event, Too

The church volunteer should get to enjoy Vacation Bible School.

The team mom should get to watch the game.

The teacher should get to focus on the students.

And the office manager should get to enjoy the company picnic without worrying about whether everybody received the right shirt.

That’s what we’re trying to accomplish at Rhodes Printing.

We take care of the artwork, the ordering website, the payments, the printing, the packaging, and even the fundraising if you need it.

You take care of bringing your people together.

Because when everything goes wrong, the organizer carries all the blame.

But when everything goes right, the organizer ought to get to enjoy some of the credit.

And we’d love to help make that happen.

Ready to make your next group shirt order easier?

Whether you need 15 shirts or 1,500, request a quote from Rhodes Printing and we’ll help you get started. Want to see how ordering works first? Click through our demo team store.