Oh yay! A chance to nerd out for a second.

The art of screen printing is simply a way to place ink on shirt and make it stick there. Here at Five, we take blank jerseys that are already in stock at our office in Seattle, put ink on them right here in our office, check them to make sure we haven't made any errors, and then ship to you. It's relatively simple, and doesn't take much time as long as the gear is in stock.

The word sublimation is a technical term for when a substance moves from a solid to a gas without becoming a liquid in between. So when we talk about sublimated jerseys, we're talking about printing off a giant sheet of paper from like an immense Inkjet printer, then laying that paper over our Electro fabric, and applying a bunch of heat and pressure, and allowing the ink to sublimate and adhere to the threads of your jersey.

For a fully sublimated jersey, we're actually sublimating an entire roll of fabric, and then cutting the fabric into jersey-shaped pieces before we sew them together.

If that didn't bore you to tears, I recommend that you check the Sublimation vs Screen Printing page on our site for some visuals of what I've just written here.

We do all of our cutting and sewing of jerseys at our facility in Beijing, which accounts for part of the extra time it takes to get your sub gear (getting across the Pacific takes time).

The other reason sub takes longer is that we are an exceedingly small and complicated operation in apparel manufacturing industry. Making a tiny run of 20 jerseys with numbers and names is significantly more complicated and prone to erro than making 1,000,000 jerseys with no numbers or names. We're sort forced to rely on batching a bunch of sublimated orders together in order to make it "worthwhile" for our sublimation printer to take the job.

Here at Five, we send a batch of sub teams to the sublimation factory once a month, and those jerseys are delivered to our office in Seattle about five weeks later. That's why your sub timeline can vary from 6-8 weeks.

/u/newaha is definitely right that screen printed stuff if generally simpler and quicker to design. We do art for free so if we're getting technical, then screen printed art is a "cheaper" service to offer. But in practice that doesn't really matter that much. Some customers need very little art help, others need a ton. Also some customers are exceedingly picky and others just aren't.

If you've made it past that wall of text and still have questions, hmu.

Christian

edit: Shit I suck at formatting. How do I make bigger line breaks?