The email lands in someone’s inbox around this time every year: “Can you sort out the shirts for D&D?” It usually arrives with a cheerful tone and a deadline that feels comfortably far away, right up until it is not.
If you are the person holding that task in 2026, August is the sweet spot to get moving. Your company Dinner and Dance, the annual D&D as most offices call it, tends to land in November or December, and the gap between now and then fills up quickly. A calm, early start is the difference between a smooth order and a frantic one. Here is a checklist to keep it on the smooth side.
Decide what you are actually printing
Before anything else, settle the format. A soft cotton tee works for a relaxed, themed night with a dance floor and a photo booth. A corporate polo tee suits a smarter dinner, or a company that wants something staff will happily wear again to the office afterwards.
Polos also open up more finishing options. Embroidery, where the design is stitched straight into the fabric, gives a logo a premium, textured look that holds up beautifully on a collared shirt. For a full-colour event graphic or a playful theme splashed across the front, printing is the better route. Plenty of companies do both, a neat embroidered logo on the chest and a bigger printed design elsewhere.
Match the shirt to the night
It helps to picture the evening itself before you choose a garment. For a lively, dressed-down themed night, a cotton tee or a Gildan tee gives you a comfortable canvas and plenty of room for a bold graphic. For a dinner where staff mingle with management or clients, a collared option looks the part, and a honeycomb polo or a Dri Fit polo keeps everyone cool in a warm ballroom. If your team spans very different roles, mixing garments within one order is fine, with the leadership in structured polos and the wider team in tees, all tied together by the same logo and colour palette.
Lock the numbers early
Headcount is the detail that trips people up. Staff join, leave, and RSVP late, so build in a small buffer and confirm sizes with a proper size run instead of guessing rather than working from last year’s list.
We carry a wide spread of sizes, and there is no minimum order, so a startup of eight and a firm of eight hundred are equally at home. Collecting sizes through one simple form, with a chart attached, spares you a long chain of follow-up messages.
Plan for spares and keepsakes
Order a handful of extra shirts in the popular sizes. New joiners, last-minute plus-ones, and the colleague who spills sauce down the front all tend to appear on the night, and a small overrun saves a scramble. Leftover shirts also make easy welcome gifts for staff who come on board in the new year.
Give the design room to represent you
A D&D shirt is not only party wear. It is a rare moment where your whole team is dressed in the same brand, phones out, photos flying onto LinkedIn and Instagram all night. That reach is genuinely useful, and it is the same reason custom shirts boost brand awareness well beyond the event itself. Give the artwork a little care, then: a clean logo, the year, and a light theme usually beat a crowded design that tries to say everything at once.
It also pays to think one year ahead. If your company runs a D&D every year, a design with a consistent logo treatment and a swappable year or theme makes reordering painless, and it quietly builds a recognisable look your staff come to expect.
Choose a print method that fits the run
The right method depends on your quantity, your colours, and your garment. As a quick guide:
- Silk screen printing suits larger runs with a small number of solid colours, keeping the price per shirt low once the screens are set up
- DTG (direct-to-garment) printing handles full-colour or photographic designs and smaller quantities, printing straight onto cotton
- Heat transfer printing is handy for short runs and for adding individual names or table numbers
- Embroidery gives polos, hoodies, and jackets that premium, hard-wearing finish
If you are torn between them, tell us the quantity and the design, and we will point you to the option that gives the best result for the budget, not the priciest one on the list.
Build in buffer time
The last piece of the checklist is time. November and December are the busiest weeks of the year for event apparel, and a rushed order limits your garment choices and your room to fix mistakes. Approving your artwork and signing off a proof by mid-October keeps everything comfortable, and it gives you a window to reorder in a specific colour or size if stock is tight closer to the date.
Ask to see the design laid out on your chosen garment colour before we print. Seeing it in context helps you catch a logo that sits too low or a colour that reads differently on navy than it did on your screen, while it is still simple to adjust. If a last-minute surprise does land in your lap, we can talk through faster options, but planning ahead will always give you the better shirt for the money.
Let us take it off your list
Year-end events come round quickly, and the teams that start early are the ones posing happily in shirts that actually fit and look the part. Whether you need a hundred polos with a stitched logo or a fun printed tee for a themed night, we would be glad to help you get it sorted well before the December rush. Come and have a chat with us at Direct T Shirt, printing for Singapore companies since 1995, and let us take the shirts off your to-do list.
