Heat Transfer Vinyl (HTV) is a different process entirely from DTG, DTF, or sublimation, and it's particularly common among small sellers doing custom, low-volume, or highly personalized orders — think a single custom name shirt for a birthday, rather than a bulk run of an identical design.
The process itself involves cutting a design out of colored vinyl sheets (using a Cricut, Silhouette, or similar cutting machine) and then heat-pressing that cut vinyl directly onto the garment, where it bonds permanently under heat and pressure. Unlike DTG or DTF, there's no printing step for single-color designs — the color comes directly from the vinyl material itself, which is why HTV is especially well-suited to bold, simple, single-color text and shapes rather than detailed, multi-color illustrations.
Multi-color HTV designs are possible but genuinely more labor-intensive, requiring each color to be cut from a separate vinyl sheet and carefully layered and pressed in the correct order — this is part of why HTV tends to suit simpler designs (names, initials, basic shapes, bold single-color graphics) better than it suits detailed illustrations, where DTF or DTG generally makes more practical sense.
File preparation for HTV leans heavily vector — since a cutting machine is tracing paths, a clean SVG with simplified, well-separated shapes is essential, similar to the requirements for vinyl decals discussed elsewhere, but with the added consideration of how the vinyl layers will physically stack if you're doing a multi-color design.
Where HTV genuinely shines for small sellers: extremely low minimum order quantities (literally one shirt is completely practical, unlike bulk screen printing) and relatively low upfront equipment cost if you're doing this yourself rather than through a POD provider — a basic cutting machine and a home heat press represent a real but fairly modest investment compared to commercial screen printing equipment, which makes HTV a genuinely accessible entry point for sellers wanting more hands-on control over small custom orders specifically.