Reading a Wholesale Quote for Caps
By The Velocity Wear Team
A wholesale cap quote breaks into four parts: the blank cap, the decoration, any one-off setup, and delivery. Caps start at $12 a piece at our fifty-piece minimum, and that figure carries the blank plus one front decoration. Anything past that — a second position, a woven label, two delivery addresses — should appear as its own line rather than hiding inside the unit price.
What is actually inside the per-piece price?
The blank and one decoration position. Which blank matters more than most buyers expect. A structured six panel, an unstructured dad cap, a foam-front trucker and a flat-peak snapback are four different garments with four different fronts to decorate, and a quote should name the one you are getting rather than saying "cap". Our wholesale caps page sets out the styles we run, and the pricing page shows how that per-piece figure falls as the quantity climbs.
Decoration usually sits inside the same number at fifty pieces. Embroidery on the front panel, a 3D puff logo, a printed patch or a sublimated panel all behave differently on the machine, but at the minimum quantity a quote tends to fold one front position into the unit price instead of itemising it. That is convenient until you want to compare two suppliers, so ask which method the price assumes.
Which lines on a cap quote are extras?
Extras are the things that change the job rather than the cap itself. The usual ones are easy to list, and a quote that shows none of them is either very simple or incomplete.
- A second or third decoration position — side panel, rear closure, under-peak
- Digitising artwork for embroidery, which is a one-off per design
- The £150 sample, credited back against the bulk order when you place it
- Private label work: a woven label, a tear-out label, a swing tag or custom packaging
- Delivery to more than one address, or outside the region the quote assumed
Why do two quotes for the same cap disagree?
Nearly always because they are not the same cap. Panel count, crown height, peak shape and closure type all sit under the word "cap", and a five panel is a different blank from a six panel before anyone stitches anything. Then there is the artwork: embroidery is priced by how much thread goes into the panel, which is why a dense badge and a thin wordmark can sit far apart on the same garment. We walk through that in how embroidery stitch count affects cost.
The other cause is quantity. Our tiers run 50–99, 100–249, 250–499, 500–999 and 1,000 and above, with up to 35% coming off the fifty-piece price at the top. A quote for 240 caps and a quote for 260 caps sit in different tiers, so comparing two numbers without comparing the quantities behind them tells you nothing.
What should you ask before approving?
Four questions cover most of it. Which blank is this, by style and closure? Which decoration method and how many positions? What is the one-off setup and does it carry forward to a repeat run? And what date does the 10–15 working day production window start from — because it starts at artwork approval, not at the enquiry.
Once the quote is clear, the budget work is separate and worth doing properly before you commit; we set that out in budgeting a bulk cap order. Approving a quote you have not read line by line is how a job that looked like $12 a cap arrives at a number you did not plan for.
One habit worth building: ask for the quote to name the quantity it is priced at, in writing. A figure with no quantity beside it cannot be compared with anything, and it cannot be held to when the order goes in at a different number. The same applies to the currency and the delivery address. None of that is suspicion, it is simply that a quote is a working document, and the details that get assumed are the ones that turn into an awkward conversation a week before the caps are due.
