Caps for Retailers: cost
By The Velocity Wear Team
Wholesale caps start at $12 a piece at the fifty-piece minimum, with up to 35% coming off that figure at the largest tier. For a retailer the useful question is not the entry price but which tier the opening buy sits in, because that single choice moves the margin on every unit for the life of the line.
What is the real cost of a wholesale cap?
Three components. The per-piece price for your tier, the one-off artwork setup spread across the run, and freight to your destination plus any import charges. Add them and you have the cost of a cap sitting in your stockroom, which is the only number that should ever go into a margin calculation. Our wholesale range covers the products alongside caps, and the caps page has the styles.
Setup is the component that misleads on a first order. It is charged once per design, so on fifty caps it is a visible part of the unit cost and on five hundred it rounds away. A retailer intending to carry a line for a year should judge it across the year, not the opening buy.
How do the quantity tiers work?
They step rather than slide: 50–99, 100–249, 250–499, 500–999 and 1,000 upward. The practical consequence is that buying just under a boundary is poor value. If your plan says 230 caps, price 250 before committing, because the difference in unit cost can be larger than the cost of the extra twenty pieces.
The counterweight is open-to-buy. A better tier that consumes the budget for three other lines is not a saving, it is a bet. Model the tiers against your cash position rather than against the discount on its own.
What should an opening buy look like?
Fifty pieces of one design is a genuine test and the minimum is set at a level that makes it viable. One design, one colourway, enough depth to look intentional on a shelf. Three designs at fifty each triples the setup, triples the admin and gives you three shallow piles, and it does not tell you which design sold because you never gave any of them a fair run.
Once a design proves itself, the second buy is where the economics change. That is the order that should reach for a tier, because by then you are buying against sell-through rather than a hunch. The margin mechanics are worked through in pricing caps for resale.
Which costs repeat and which do not?
The caps and the freight repeat on every order. The artwork setup does not, provided the design stays identical — change the colourway, the decoration method or the position and it becomes a new design with a new setup and its own fifty-piece minimum. That is worth knowing before a buyer decides to refresh a line for the sake of it.
Samples sit in between. The £150 sample fee is credited against the bulk order, so it is a cash-flow item on a new design and nothing at all on a repeat you have already held. We deliver to the UK, USA and Europe and invoice in seven currencies, so the currency you budget in can be the currency on the invoice.
Set the retail price once, against the landed cost, and resist moving it because a tier came in better than expected. A line that has been priced down is hard to price back up, and the saving from a good buy is worth more sitting in the margin than handed over at the till. If you want to spend the improved cost, spend it on going deeper next time or on the private label extras that make the cap present better, rather than on shaving the shelf price.
