Have you ever had a problem, one of those situations where you need to get something done… or find something out… or track something down… and all of a sudden the solution just appears for you?

Sometimes it is as major as finding as new job, or a new car. Other times it is as simple as suddenly finding that scrap of paper with a phone number you thought you lost.

I had one of those situations this week. As part of my work, I help manage the pay parking lot for our building. It is a fairly automated system, but we still need to have an attendant in the evenings, it’s a customer service thing. We’ve never had uniforms or anything for the couple part-time workers. This winter we popped for some nice jackets in “tow- truck yellow”, that bright safety wear color with reflectors and such. They are actually rather nice jackets… lots of pockets… very warm… but I digress. With spring (maybe) coming, followed (hopefully) by summer, we are looking for other options for these guys. T-Shirts have always been something we have looked at, but to get them silk-screened, we need to order at least a couple dozen, pay for set up, and what if we get all XLs and the next guy we have to hire is a XXL, or a Medium?

Welp yesterday I came across a link for SonicShack – it’s a slick site where you can design your own t-shirts design your own t-shirts and have them custom printed. They also offer a few other products, like sweatshirts and jerseys.

The site is all flash driven, and the interface is really slick… you pick your product, in our case t-shirts, where they had 20 different ones to choose from. I found a Hanes Beefy T that came in the color that our building uses in the signage and just clicked the Add Text button. From there I selected the back of the shirt and entered “Uptown Row” and “Parking Attendant” as two different lines.

You can change the font, there’s a dozen or so to choose from, change the size, text color, rotate, and do layering of different items. One nice thing would be able to do text on an arc… but… if you whip it up in your own graphics program, you can just upload it as a custom image. Oh.. yea… you can upload your own images, including photos. And if you don’t have one of your own, they seem to have a LOT of stock graphics you can add yourself.

You can add your stuff to the front or back… and while they show left and right sleeve options, they are grayed out, I couldn’t find a shirt you could do them on. There are a bunch of other options too, sending your design to someone, saving it (may need to sign up for a free account for that I suppose), they even have a sort of plug-in so you can add a shop to your own site using an affiliate program and sell your own custom t-shirts (I may have to look in to that more later).

Now the kicker, and why this is going to be why we use it for work here, is you can order as few as one shirt or as many as… well, I suppose as many as you want (looks like they have a ‘get a quote’ option for large orders). Each order is digitally printed, so you could even do photo-shirts I suppose. The prices here ($15 or so for the Hanes T’s) seem in line with, or even cheaper than sites like Cafe Press, and definitely more color and size options. We do some custom t-shirts for our paintball team, I may look at moving towards this site for those instead. With SonicShack, each member could add their call-sign or other info to the shirt.

We may be ordering the shirts for work here in the next week or so, I’ll add a comment on the print quality once we get them in. Oh yea, the link I had included a promo-code “sonic20″, use that to get 20% off any order placed before the end of May.

Design and Create your own Custom T-Shirts [sonicshack.com]