Glossary
Sublimation vs screen printing
Sublimation bonds dye into polyester with no surface layer and no per-colour setup, making it ideal for full-colour designs at any quantity. Screen printing pushes ink through a stencil per colour, which is cheap at volume and expensive for one-offs.
The economics diverge sharply with quantity. Screen printing charges setup per colour, so a four-colour design across ten units is uneconomic and across a thousand units is very cheap. Sublimation has no setup, so unit one costs the same as unit five hundred.
For print on demand, where the order quantity is one, sublimation and other digital methods are the only workable options. Screen printing belongs to the bulk side of a business, not the on-demand side.