How many shirt bar stations do I need?

The single biggest driver of a smooth shirt bar is matching station count to your crowd. Too few and the line stalls; too many and you're paying for idle capacity. Here's the simple math we use.

Start with throughput

One staffed station reliably produces 40 to 60 finished shirts per hour with live DTF pressing. Call it 50 as a planning number. Multiply that by your event's active hours and you have one station's capacity for the event.

Estimate how many guests want a shirt

Not every guest will make a shirt, but at a good bar most do — plan for 60 to 80 percent participation. For a 200-guest party, that's roughly 120 to 160 shirts you want to produce comfortably within your window.

Do the quick division

• 100 guests, 3 hours — one station handles it with room to spare.
• 200 guests, 4 hours — two stations keep the line short.
• 400 guests, 5 hours — three to four stations so nobody waits.
• Festival, all day, waves of traffic — plan three or four and stagger the menu.

Other things that nudge the count

A complex build-your-own menu slows each press slightly, so add capacity if you're offering lots of choices. A concentrated rush — everyone hitting the bar at once after a keynote — argues for an extra station even if the total count is modest. When you send us your guest count and run-of-show, we scope the stations for you. See the pricing page for how added stations are quoted.