Minimum Orders Explained for Cafes
By The Velocity Wear Team
The minimum is 50 pieces per design, not 50 per person or 50 per size. A cafe with six staff still orders 50, and the sizes inside that run are entirely yours to choose. What creates a second minimum is a second design: a different colour of shirt, or a colourway that needs its own screens, counts separately even if the logo is identical.
How does the 50-piece minimum work for a five-person team?
You order 50 and you dress the team several times over. In practice a small cafe uses roughly two thirds of a run in the first year: three shirts each for the standing team, replacements for the two people who leave, and a handful handed to weekend cover. The rest sits as stock. The alternative, buying blanks locally and having them printed in tens, costs more per piece and gives you a different shade of black every time the supplier changes batch. Start from the hospitality product list to see which items make sense to commit 50 pieces to.
Does a second colourway count as a second order?
Yes, if it needs its own screens or its own garment stock. A black tee and a sand tee carrying the same artwork are two designs and two lots of 50. That is worth knowing before you plan a two-colour uniform, because it doubles the commitment for what is often a decorative choice. Where the budget genuinely needs two looks, the usual answer is one garment in one colour for everyday and a second product entirely, such as a cap or an apron, to carry the contrast. Our explainer on how minimums work in wholesale clothing covers the same logic across other products.
Can two sites combine into one run?
They can, and they should. Two cafes ordering 50 each separately pay the 50-piece rate twice. The same two cafes ordering 100 together move into the next discount tier and can still have the boxes split and labelled by site on delivery. Groups of four or five sites reach 250 without effort, which is another step down the scale towards the ceiling of 35 percent. The only requirement is that the design is shared, so agree the artwork across sites before anyone orders.
What do you do with the pieces you do not need yet?
Store them flat, in size order, somewhere dry and out of the light, and log what is in the box. The spare pieces are the reason a new barista gets a branded shirt on their first shift instead of their third week, and they remove the temptation to reorder small quantities at short notice. A cafe that keeps its spares organised effectively converts the minimum into a two-year supply. Our note on what a 50-piece minimum actually changes makes the same case for small brands, and the full wholesale range shows what else can ride on the same order.
The pieces you genuinely cannot use have a job too. Sell them at the counter, give them to regulars, or keep a few for photography. A branded tee on a customer is advertising you have already paid for.
There is a design decision hiding inside the minimum. Artwork that is simply the shop name can sit on a tee, a cap and an apron unchanged, even though each garment still carries its own 50 pieces. Artwork drawn to fit one specific garment shape has to be redrawn for each product, which adds approval time rather than cost. Committing to a mark that works at several sizes and in a single colour keeps the whole programme flexible, and it makes the later decision about which product to repeat considerably easier.
Write the minimum into the plan rather than treating it as an obstacle. Once a cafe accepts that one order means 50 pieces, the question stops being how to avoid it and becomes which single garment deserves that commitment. It is a far easier question to answer, and it usually produces a better uniform.
