Unique Ts - The idea

Silk screening is economical if you only want one or two colors and are going to make hundreds of shirts. There is a large overhead cost that makes it expensive to make only a few shirts.

To solve this, we need a process optimized to make only a few shirts for less than what it would cost to do with silk screening. The solution is something closer to a normal printer. The design I’m imagining is a row of a few hundred small syringe-like injectors over the working surface. These syringes would be filled with paint by other syringes, which gets the paints from the paint cans. After the row of syringes are filled they would be lowered to the surface of the shirt and plungers would push the paint onto the shirt.

After putting the first row of paint on the shirt, the syringes lift and move over to a bucket where water is run through the syringes to clear out the paint. Next comes the drying of the syringes, then finally they are ready to be loaded with another round of paint.

Users would upload images to UniqueTs. They would then get to choose how many colors they want and see what the shirt would look like. After manual review (to keep out really messed up stuff) the image would be sent to the printer.

There would probably be some concern about copyright infringement, but it might be possible to get around that by requiring that the user verify that they are not infringing any copyrights.

There would also be a limit of how many copies could be made. For larger orders, UniqueTs would refer the user to partner t-shirt printers.