If you are looking to have the shirts printed by an outside business, then you want to use a company that screen prints directly to the shirts. (Plastisol transfers are themselves screen printed, so better and cheaper to just screen print directly to the shirt if you are going to outsource
all of the production work.)
The downside to having the shirts screen printed is that you must commit to how many you want of each color, size, and style before you have any idea what sells well for you.
^ I know that is pretty much what you were asking to start with, but we really can't tell you which of your shirts will sell well in which sizes and styles.
If you are going to go with outside screen printing, I would make the first order of shirts pretty low in volume--even though it will cost you more per shirt--so that you can learn more about your target market and how they respond to your product before committing to a larger print run.
To speedup turnaround times, I would use a local print vendor and use T-shirt styles/colors that they keep in stock or can source locally.
^ That will allow you to run with a minimum of inventory while you sort out your product and its market. It does not matter if it costs more per unit and squeezes your profits, as that is much, much better than being stuck with thousands of dollars of merchandise that you cannot sell.
As to quantity and sizes. Unless your designs skew toward kids or older fatter adults, most of your sales would be Medium, Large, and XL. When dealing with a small sample size it is easy for a few outliers to skew the numbers, so I would always stock a little more of the lower selling sizes than you expect to sell.
So a
starting place for size distribution is: S 10%; M 20%; L 20%; XL 20%; 2XL 10%. I would not mess with XS or 3XL+ unless you find there is a market for it.
You mentioned that you are on a limited budget (aren't we all!). I would limit your initial offerings to your strongest designs--as others have said, seek some outside opinions on this.
I think you got off track a few times with the lingo we used in our responses, sorry, jargon
. Still, you need to be more familiar with your options in order to avoid
avoidable mistakes. Mistakes will be made and you will learn from them, but better to learn what you can from the mistakes of others, first. Which is exactly what you are trying to do here
.
All that said, I would research your options more before investing in inventory or equipment. Don't throw all your effort and money at the first try, or you won't be able to leverage what you learned from it.