In this project, the tee is $40. In VM the tee is $25.

But I think the soundtrack was seen by Braff as a Big Deal, which is probably why it shows up at a lower price point ($20) than the tee.

I glanced through the reward levels and I think he's done a smart job of pricing them.

A lot of people make the mistake of setting the reward levels at store pricing levels rather than rewards. Printed t-shirts are fairly expensive, especially when you add in shipping, so it's easy to end up with very little margin on a reward level that includes a t-shirt, especially if it's near the $15 dollar level (which is pretty much cost). It's smarter to use intangible rewards (like digital goods) that have near zero incremental cost or to make sure that you have at least 100% margin on anything else. Assuming that you're running your kickstarter for financing and not as a pre-order store.

especially if it's near the $15 dollar level (which is pretty much cost).

I remember ordering once (this was 7 years ago) at $5-$7 a tee and USPS charged around 2.75 at the time, for a grand total closer to $10

Yes but if the T-shirt award level had tens of thousands of backers, they can hire a large company like threadless to print and distribute the T-shirts (Even complicated Threadless t-shirts are mostly $20 with a nice profit margin, with free shipping on orders over $50). At these scales $25 is quite profitable.

You misread my statement. The claim the parent made was that $15 was near cost, and I was stating my experience that the soup-to-nuts cost is closer to $10 (and could be lower)

It was kind of a Big Deal. I've been part of or party to this conversation many times (details vary, this is the gist of it tho):

"blah blah blah Zach Braff blah blah"

"Who's Zach Braff?"

"The guy from Scrubs, he also did some movies."

"Oh yeah, Garden State right? That had a great sound track."

It is a big deal... the Garden State soundtrack is still in my regular rotation now almost 10 years later. Braff's projects have always had good soundtracks.

Yeah, and VM was $35 for the tee plus movie. Which personally seems to value the movie itself rather low.