Rush Order Tees Alternatives

Last Updated on December 6, 2025 by Ewen Finser

Rush Order Tees is a popular customized clothing company, though they also offer customizable promo products. Their bread and butter is the fact that they offer fast shipping (hence the name), but there are many reasons why you might be looking for Rush Order Tees alternatives. 

On several occasions, I have needed a company that provides something more affordable, better quality, or with more design functions. Here are the alternatives I found:

1. Better Catalog: 4Imprint or VistaPrint
2. Better Price: Printful or BlueCotton
3. Better Printing Quality: BlueCotton or ooShirts
4. Better Design Functions: CustomInk or BlueCotton
5. Better Shipping: BlueCotton or Printify

Let’s look at each of these in more detail. 

Rush Order Tees Alternatives for Catalog

Rush Order Tees has over 800 products, many of them apparel-based. Their apparel line is quite extensive for a wholesaler, though less than what many comparable print-on-demand or POD companies offer. Their catalog promotes name brands like Nike, Gildan, and Hanes for shirts or Carhartt for outerwear. 

So if you are looking for a specific brand name, perhaps one whose quality you know you can trust, or one that might jive well with your business (like Carhartt beanies for a lumber yard Christmas gift), Rush Order Tees can be great. But as soon as you start looking beyond this scope for higher quality but still affordable cotton apparel products, or even a wider range of office products and promotional accessories, you have to start searching elsewhere.

4Imprint

Best for: Promotional products and trade shows

4Imprint is one of the oldest custom print shops, with the biggest TV commercial marketing presence. They have one of the most impressive catalogs for promotional products. If Rush Order Tees isn’t meeting all of your promo needs, and you need additional products like USB drives, snacks, stuffed animals, first aid kits, or office awards, 4Imprint is what you want. 

The timeline isn’t nearly as fast, and you can expect most of your things to take several weeks. They do offer some expedited shipping options, but not many. And while they certainly have the biggest catalog you will find, that also means that they don’t specialize in anything, and they outsource their production. 

So bear in mind that the quality won’t be as good as Rush Order Tees when it comes to different types of clothing, apparel, and quality material, but if you need to buy multiple promotional products, this might be a good place to look.

VistaPrint

Best for: Office products and paper products 

Similarly, VistaPrint can be a good alternative for offices and large-scale organizations that are looking to print paper products. 

Rush Order Tees somewhat specializes in apparel, so anyone who might need promotional hats, hoodies, stationery, or office folders for an event like a trade show might find better catalog options with VistaPrint. 

They can help you with logo design and even custom websites for your business needs, even if you are trying to build a one-off promotional website for things like a community marathon or a charity event. 

From there, you can opt into the wholesale print program to find discounts on printed materials, namely paper options.

Rush Order Tees Alternatives for Price

Rush Order Tees is well known for its rushed shipping, but the price point on many of its products is relatively high. A big part of this higher price point is that they use brand names. Those brand names can include Carhartt and Nike, for which organizations might pay $50 per shirt. 

If you are looking to save money on the price, or you are not interested in a name-brand shirt but are willing to pay for a high-quality cotton without a label, there are many alternatives that cost significantly less.

Printful

Best for: Influencers or merchandise websites with PPO needs

Printful is a good Rush Order Tees alternative for price on single orders. The company has a paper order pricing structure, so it doesn’t have any monthly fees for the most basic service. Of course, if you run an e-commerce site and you want to be able to save your previous projects and Link orders to your website, you might have increased monthly costs.

Aside from that, you pay a blank item cost with an additional fee for things like:

• The type of printing technique you want
• Whether you are printing on extra areas, like an inside label
• If you want embroidery
• The number of colors you are using

Shipping is then calculated based on the type of shipping speed and partner being used, such as DHL or USPS, and any applicable sales tax for the shipping address.

BlueCotton

Best for: High-quality cotton apparel at affordable discounts for low-bulk orders

BlueCotton is a better alternative for community organizers, volunteers, churches, universities, or businesses looking to place bulk orders, but not necessarily looking for bulk orders in the 5,000+ range. 

With BlueCotton’s website, volunteers or employees can immediately calculate their expected costs based on the quantity. BlueCotton’s website lets you choose the product, the color, and the design of that product, and then select the number of pieces you need. As you increase the number, you can see in real time the average cost decrease in price.

Whereas most wholesale companies might start providing the best discounts once users purchase hundreds or thousands of products, BlueCotton starts offering discounts with as few as six. 

Rush Order Tees Alternatives for Printing Quality

Rush Order Tees offers several printing methods, largely because they use several printers. They outsource to many different printing companies across the United States, so when you place an order, they check availability with these third parties and then process the print job.

This means that at any given time, if you don’t specify, your high-volume order for something like a church fundraiser might utilize screen printing, so the more that shirt gets washed, the more degraded the screen print becomes. They don’t use the same printing company every time, so if your church were to place a second order a few months later, the quality might not be the same, because it might come from another printer located several states away.

BlueCotton

Best for: Overall quality, with 9-step QC checks on all orders and guaranteed delivery

BlueCotton is located in Kentucky, and they handle everything in-house. From the moment you place your order until the moment it is delivered, everyone works at the same location. Every order you place from one month to the next is manufactured and produced in the same facility, so you can rely heavily not only on the quality of the material that they use but also on the quality of the print.

BlueCotton takes care of its employees, and in return, its employees take care of customers. If, for example, you have an issue with the sample you ordered, the customer service representatives with whom you speak sit in the same building as the production managers, so they can solve your problems effectively – certainly more effectively than a different company that has to figure out to whom they outsourced your particular print project to.

BlueCotton has a nine-step quality control process that they go through in-house, so it is unlikely that you will have to deal with getting a refund or redoing an order, because any potential issues get caught long before your order is shipped.

ooShirts

Best for: Those who want screen printing or DTG printing for small orders with infinite color choices

ooShirts is a high-quality printing company that offers screen printing for bulk orders with limited colors and direct-to-garment (DTG) printing for more intricate designs. Their DTG printing is for small orders or complicated designs, like a family photo that you want printed on shirts. This is a popular option because the ink binds to the fabric rather than being printed right on top. 

Because this company uses a direct-to-consumer model and they automate the printing process, they are typically more affordable, upwards of 30% below their competitors, without compromising quality, because they use some of the same quality products. They also have guaranteed delivery for the different printing technologies, and they will do a redo or a full refund if the print quality is poor or the materials have defects.

Rush Order Tees Alternatives for Design Functions

Rush Order Tees lets you design and print custom clothing with no minimums. They have a free tool to instantly generate images. For example, if you want to create ugly sweaters for an office party, you might type in “holiday party design with snowflakes for a winter wonderland ball 2025,” and it will generate an image with snowflake silhouettes and the typeface you want. 

However, the design functions otherwise are pretty limited. It is somewhere between the basic logo options of 4Imprint and the better AI offerings of BlueCotton. 

CustomInk

Best for: Basic design functions with text and pictures (one-off events, volunteers, individuals)

CustomInk is a heavy contender in the world of design functions. It is a good alternative for people who want to make more creative designs beyond a basic logo/image. You can have more flexibility to design not only where your content goes (be it a logo or image), but also what content you have. 

The tools look a lot like any customization program, with options for text, symbols, basic images, and so forth. You can change the font, size, placement, and even add a graphic. 

If you don’t have an image or graphic you want to use for your printed material (and even if you do), this design tool is impressive. 

BlueCotton

Best for: Robust designs with images, text, and AI support (community events, influencers, churches, businesses)

BlueCotton is one step beyond CustomInk in terms of what it offers for design assistance. The design functions look pretty similar to CustomInk, with the exception of the AI design. 

So, where Rush Order Tees might design an ugly sweater party logo with a bunch of snowflakes and the title of the event, BlueCotton can generate a full AI image with a robust winterscape as the background, with two employees wearing ugly sweaters, their backs looking out at the winterscape, and the name of the office on top. 

Sometimes I really prefer AI-generated images (if I can get the wording right), because they avoid the copyright limitations that a lot of companies deal with (Rush Order Tees is one such company, hence why their image and idea generation is so limited). 

Rush Order Tees Alternatives for Shipping

Rush Order Tees gets its name from its rush shipping options. Compared to a lot of large-scale companies that have lengthy (think 2-week minimum) shipping, Rush Order Tees offers 3-day shipping options, with standard production taking up to two weeks. If you need something sooner, theoretically, you can call their agents, but there is no guarantee production can be managed because Rush Order Tees outsources its manufacturing. The “rush” behind Rush Order only happens if they get confirmation from one of their printers. 

BlueCotton

Best for: Super fast shipping without compromising quality (9-step QC check in-house)

BlueCotton is a great Rush Order Tees alternative for those who want higher quality printing with the same rush services. 

At its most basic, BlueCotton offers more reliable and affordable production timelines, with everything managed in-house. The streamlined production times are a standard 10 days, with free shipping. 

If you are placing your first order and aren’t sure about the design, you can have printed samples for free on orders of 250 or more. Smaller orders can get a printed sample for $100, which gets credited toward that order once you are ready to finalize. 

When you’ve had a look at the quality and are ready to go, BlueCotton has:

• 1-day super rush delivery
• 3-day rush delivery
• 5-day rush delivery

Speed is one of their major advantages as an industry-leading alternative with 25% of all customers choosing these rush services because they trust in the guaranteed delivery dates. 

Printify

Best for: POD shipping and small/individual orders

Printify is a decent print company for apparel and promo products, including mugs, bags, stickers, posters, candles, and the like. It’s free to sign up and lets you scale easily without holding inventory. 

Printify doesn’t include shipped samples before you place your order, so that’s a bummer. You basically have to pay for whatever it is you are printing (ordering 1 unit), see how it turns out, and if you like it, placing your full order. If you don’t like it, try again. 

However, the biggest reason they don’t give free samples or even discounted samples like Rush Order Tees or BlueCotton is that they are a print-on-demand service, or POD. This makes them an ideal alternative to Rush Order Tees for shipping one-off orders from an e-commerce site, for example. 

Given the POD model, there are no minimum requirements, and you can choose from different shipping options, including Economy, Standard, Priority, and Express options. If you save a design, it can be automatically reordered through e-commerce store integration. Alternatively, you can save your own designs for, say, a church or community function, and reorder the same thing a year or so later manually. 

Summing Up

There are a lot of good alternatives to Rush Order Tees, depending on the characteristic or feature you are prioritizing. If you need paper products and office supplies, and the catalog from Rush Order Tees is a bit too limited, then companies like 4Imprint can help. If you want improved shipping, quality, and price on your apparel, BlueCotton is the best Rush Order Tees alternative.