Caps for Retailers: samples
By The Velocity Wear Team
A cap sample costs £150, and that £150 is credited against your bulk order when it goes ahead. For a retailer it buys the one thing a screen cannot show you: crown height, brim curve, closure feel and how the embroidery actually sits on a six-panel front. One physical cap, your blank, your artwork, decorated the way the run will be decorated.
What does a cap sample cost, and what arrives?
The fee covers a single-unit production run, which is why samples are never free: artwork is digitised, a machine is set for one hat, and one hat is made. You get it in the colourway you specified with the decoration in place. Ask for it on the exact blank you intend to stock, because a five-panel and a six-panel in the same colour photograph almost identically and wear nothing alike. Our wholesale caps page lists the styles we hold, and the broader wholesale range shows what else can travel on the same order.
Transit sits on top of production on both legs. Retailers usually want the cap in hand before a buying meeting rather than after it, so work backwards from that meeting date instead of hoping.
What should a reseller check before approving?
Handle it like stock, not like a proof. The questions that decide sell-through are rarely about whether the logo is centred.
- Crown height and structure. A stiffened six-panel stands tall on a shelf; an unstructured cap slumps. They sell to different shoppers at different prices.
- Brim curve out of the box, because a flat brim the customer bends themselves is a different product from a pre-curved one.
- Closure type: plastic snapback, metal buckle or elastic fit, and whether it is still comfortable after an hour on the head.
- Stitch density across small type and any outline under two millimetres, where embroidery loses detail first.
- Thread colour against the panel under shop lighting rather than daylight, since most of your customers will only ever see it indoors.
If two blanks are genuinely in contention, order both. Three hundred pounds spent deciding beats fifty caps you end up discounting, and the sample fee is £150 per cap credited against the bulk order that follows.
How does the sample change what you order?
Caps mostly sell as one size with an adjustable closure, so the size-curve problem that dogs a tee range barely applies. What the sample changes is the colour split. Seeing your logo stitched tells you which panel colours flatter it, and a fifty-piece run should be weighted towards those rather than spread thinly across six shades. The minimum is fifty pieces per design, and any colourway that needs its own screens counts as a design of its own.
Margin works back from the from-price of $12 a cap at fifty pieces. Move up through the tiers — 50 to 99, 100 to 249, 250 to 499, 500 to 999, then 1,000 and above — and the per-piece falls by up to 35% against the fifty-piece price. For a reseller that spread is the difference between one markup and two.
Is a sample worth it on a first run of fifty?
On a blank you have never stocked, yes. On a cap you already sell, where the only change is a thread colour, the money is better spent on stock — a reorder conversation covers it faster, and we go through that in reordering caps as a retailer.
A render is not a substitute for either. AI mockups versus physical samples sets out what an image genuinely cannot carry: fabric weight, the stiffness of a buckram front, a brim that will not hold the curve you drew.
