Why I Stopped Ordering Shirts and Banners From Different Companies
I used to order our event stuff from three different places. Shirts from a t-shirt printer. Banners from a large-format shop. Bags and giveaways from a promotional products catalog.
It worked. Sort of. Here's what actually happened in practice.
## The color problem
Our brand red is Pantone 186C. On the shirts, it came out as a warm, slightly orange-toned red. On the banners, it was a cooler, bluer red. On the tote bags, it was somewhere in between. Standing at the booth, everything was "red" but nothing matched.
This happened because each vendor uses different printing methods, different ink sets, and different material substrates. The t-shirt printer does DTG printing. The banner shop does large-format UV printing. The bag company does screen printing. Same Pantone number, three different results.
## The timing problem
The shirts arrived on Tuesday. Great. The banners were delayed because the file needed to be reformatted for their system — didn't arrive until Thursday. The event was Friday. We spent Thursday afternoon in a panic refreshing a FedEx tracking page.
When everything comes from one order, one production team coordinates the timeline. If the banner needs an extra day, they know to hold the shirts so everything arrives together.
## The invoice problem
This one's boring but real. Three vendors means three invoices, three payment terms, three follow-up emails when accounts payable has questions. For a single event. Multiply that by four events a year and you're spending real time on procurement admin.
## What changed
We started ordering everything through one source. The branded shirts, the banners, the bags — same order, same checkout. The colors are consistent because the same team reviews all the artwork files together. Everything ships on the same timeline. One invoice.
The first time we did it, I remember setting up the booth and noticing that the red on the shirts and the red on the banner actually matched. It sounds small but it makes everything look noticeably more polished.
## The math
On our last event order, going through a single source saved us about $300 in combined shipping versus what we would have paid across three separate vendors. That's not a theoretical number — I went back and priced out the old way.
The bigger savings are in time. I used to spend parts of three different days coordinating artwork with three vendors. Now it's one upload, one approval, done.
If you're juggling multiple vendors for your branded stuff, it might be worth trying a [combined order](/shop) to see if the consolidation makes sense for your team. It did for us.