Piqué

Piqué is knitted, not woven, despite looking like a textured weave — it's built with a variation on the basic knit stitch that creates small raised ridges or a subtle waffle-like face, most commonly in a diamond or birdseye pattern called mini-piqué or micro-piqué on finer-gauge versions. That raised surface traps more air than flat jersey, which is part of why classic polo fabric feels a bit heavier and holds its shape better under a collar.

It's the fabric under nearly every classic polo shirt — think a standard 6.5 oz cotton piqué polo — and its texture is exactly why polo orders get steered toward embroidery over screen printing. We tell clients up front that a fine-line screen print on piqué's raised face tends to look soft and slightly broken up compared to the same art on flat jersey, because the ink has to bridge the fabric's ridges.

Left-chest embroidery is the default for piqué for exactly that texture reason, with digitizing adjusted for a slightly raised, uneven surface rather than the flat platen a jersey tee gives you. If a customer insists on print, keep the art bold and low-detail and expect some texture show-through rather than a crisp edge.

Buyers sometimes ask why their polo's embroidered logo looks cleaner than their screen-printed tee's identical design. It isn't a quality difference — piqué's raised knit structure genuinely favors embroidery, and matching the decoration method to the fabric is what makes both jobs look right.