Ordering Caps for Leavers Season
By The Velocity Wear Team
Start a leavers cap order in spring, well before the final term. Production is 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, and in front of that sit design sign-off, name collection if you are personalising, and payment collection from families. Those three take longer than the manufacturing does, every single year.
When does a leavers cap order have to start?
Anchor on the day the caps are handed out, then walk backwards through four stages: distribution and sorting at school, transit, the 10 to 15 working day build, and approval. That arithmetic alone reaches back several weeks. What extends it further is the school-specific work in front, which nobody can compress.
Collecting money is usually the longest stage. A year group paying individually takes weeks to settle, and no order should be placed against payments that have not arrived. Getting the specification and price fixed early on the wholesale caps page lets you publish a firm figure to parents rather than an estimate you later have to revise.
Can each cap carry a different name?
Individual names are a per-piece operation rather than a shared setup, so they are quoted per job and they change the schedule. The 50-piece minimum still applies to the design, and the personalised element sits on top of it. Ask for it to be quoted explicitly rather than assuming it is included, and ask what the deadline for the final name list is.
A cheaper and faster alternative that works well is a shared design with the year printed or stitched on it, and no individual names at all. It removes the list, removes the late additions, and removes the pupil who spells their own name differently on the form than on the register. If names do go on, lock the list on a date and hold that date.
What does a leavers cap cost per pupil?
Caps start from $12 a piece at the 50-piece minimum, before decoration complexity and delivery. A year group is usually comfortably over fifty, which puts most schools into a better band straight away: the tiers run 50 to 99, 100 to 249, 250 to 499, 500 to 999 and 1,000-plus, with up to 35% off the 50-piece price at the top.
Two schools ordering the same design can pool into a better band, which is worth raising if you are part of a trust or a local group. What does not pool is two different designs, because each design counts separately against the minimum regardless of who is paying for it.
What goes wrong in the last week of term?
Late additions, mostly. Pupils who did not order and then want one, staff who assumed they were included, and a handful of caps that need to exist after the run has finished. Build a small buffer into the order rather than planning a second run, because a repeat is another full production window and the term will have ended.
The other recurring issue is a design detail that reads badly at the size it is actually stitched. A crest with fine lettering under it turns to mush on a cap front, which is why position and scale need deciding early; that is set out in print placement on caps. If this is a first order for the school, the whole sequence is walked through in your first bulk cap order, and a physical sample at £150, credited against the bulk order, can be requested from the samples page.
