When it comes to customising clothes for your brand, few decisions are more important than selecting the right fabric. Whether you’re looking to design simple yet effective T-shirts or make a statement with personalised denim jackets, creating clothing for brand events or campaigns begins with choosing the right material for your canvas.
Fabric selection for brands requires a few important considerations. At AWDis, we recognise that perfecting personalised clothing starts with understanding how the garment will be worn, what it needs to do, and what really matters to the people wearing it. Choosing the best fabric for activewear, merchandise, and branded uniforms requires different considerations, so this essential apparel fabric guide will cover all you need to know.
Starting With the Basics: Recognising Different Types of Clothing Material
Choosing the right fabric is clearly important for your branded apparel, so let’s dive into some of the basics every creator and designer ought to know.
What Are the Main Types of Fabric?
- Natural Fibres: These fabrics are derived from plants, animals, and insects, making them highly renewable and biodegradable. They are particularly breathable and absorbent.
- Synthetic Fibres: These fabrics are manufactured from synthetic polymers. Utilising petroleum-based chemicals rather than natural sources, they’re durable and often resistant to wrinkles and stains.
- Blends: These fabrics are combinations of two or more fibres in a single yarn. By combining fibres, blends can benefit from the respective material benefits of their parent fabrics.
What Are the Best Fabrics for Clothes? Some Classic Options
- Cotton: A fundamental material across all AWDis ranges, cotton is an all-rounder, providing breathability, softness, moisture-wicking, and excellent printability. Ringspun cotton, with longer, stronger strands, also has one of the best weights for embroidery designs.
- Polyester: Used throughout our Just Cool range, polyester is durable and strong, making it ideal for garments that need to last wear after wear. Moisture-wicking, it keeps the wearer cool and comfortable, making it essential for gymwear.
- Cotton/Polyester Blends: Providing the best of both worlds, these blends are ideal for garments that need to balance a soft touch with long-lasting quality.
How to Choose Fabrics for Clothes Customisation
1. What’s the Occasion?
The first step in choosing the right material for your brand’s custom apparel is determining the clothing’s purpose. Will the clothing be worn for a physical or sporting activity? Will the clothing be worn outside or in chilly weather? Is the clothing designed to celebrate a specific event, such as leaving school?
By answering these questions, you can narrow down potential materials, leaving only those appropriate for your brand’s needs.
For example, if you identify that the clothing you are personalising needs to be worn during a company sports day, its materials should be lightweight and breathable, such as 100% polyester, 135 GSM Cool Smooth T.
2. Think Customisation, Think Properties
Once you know what your clothing needs to do, the next step is to figure out what the fabric needs to deliver. Think about how it will be customised, because the best apparel fabrics for screen printing and vinyl design won’t necessarily be the same.
If we take the AWDis Washed T, for example, its 55% ringspun cotton/45% polyester composition means it’s versatile enough to accommodate a wide range of decoration methods, including embroidery, screen printing, and vinyl. However, if your design requires a water-based ink, the best fabric for T-shirt screen printing here would be 100% ringspun cotton, as featured in our Tie-Dye T.
Across the spectrum of apparel materials – spanning cotton, polyester, linen, wool and more – performance properties matter too. For example, the Women’s Cool Training Shorts are exceptional at wicking moisture thanks to their 87% polyester/13% elastane blend, one of the best fabrics for activewear.
3. Identify Priority Number One
Finally, choosing the right material for your brand’s customisable clothing starts with getting clear on your core priorities. We’ve already looked at two big ones, but there’s a third priority that’s becoming increasingly relevant: sustainability.
More and more clothes are being made with recycled materials, and at AWDis, we recognise the importance of this movement. Our Ecologie range was created with sustainability at its core, offering fits that give pre-loved materials a second life and keep them out of landfill. Take the Iguazu Sustainable Knit Hoodie, for example. Made from a 70% regenerated cotton and 30% recycled polyester blend, it’s a smart, eco-conscious choice when you’re looking for the best fabric for hoodies without compromising on comfort or style.
Another priority may be providing your employees with a range to choose from. At AWDis, we’re proud to offer products in up to 100+ colours, giving your employees or customers the freedom to choose shades that reflect their identity. But colour choice isn’t just about variety – it’s about quality too. Selecting the right fabric blend ensures those bold hues, from baby pink to apple green to sapphire blue, stay vibrant wash after wash.
For example, our iconic College Hoodie is available in a variety of material blends, allowing it to come in different colours. From 52% ringspun cotton/48% polyester for charcoal to 75% ringspun cotton/25% polyester for heather grey, tone and shade depend on the materials’ composition, so deciding on your desired colour range can help focus your material options.
Understanding Why Fabric Choice is Key
We’ve looked at how to select the right fabric for your custom apparel, but why does it matter so much? Here’s why fabric choice really counts when it comes to branded clothing:
- Brand Perception: Fabric can communicate a lot with its quality, so selecting a premium material that suits its purpose can say a lot about your brand’s vision and foresight.
- Printability: Not all fabrics are created equal when it comes to decoration – some materials are better suited to certain print techniques than others, so making the right choice can be pivotal to ensuring the long-lasting vibrancy of your customisation.
- Comfort: Your brand’s clothing needs to feel as good as it looks, so its fabrics need to be comfortable to wear.
- Durability: Clothing that lasts wash after wash is much more likely to become a wardrobe staple, so choosing fabrics that retain their shape and colour is pivotal.
Discover the Best Fabric for Clothes at AWDis
Choosing the right material for your brand’s custom apparel is integral to ensuring the clothing is both suitable for its purpose and compatible with your chosen design method. Considering these factors, along with priorities such as sustainability and colour range, will help you determine the most appropriate material for your brand.
At AWDis, our range of garments is crafted from top-quality materials, enabling you to customise the perfect pieces for your brand. Check out our ranges and find the perfect customisable clothes for you. Got questions? Reach out – our team is always here to help!
