Care Home and Healthcare Uniform: Tunics, Polos and Fleeces
By The Velocity Wear Team
Care and healthcare uniform is typically embroidered rather than printed, because garments are laundered at high temperatures far more often than in other sectors. Velocity Wear produces branded tunics, polos and fleeces from a 20-piece minimum with mixed sizes, delivered on a tracked UK service, with bulk discounts up to around 40%.
Laundering Drives the Specification
Care settings wash uniform hot and frequently for hygiene reasons, and that single constraint determines most of the specification. Printed logos degrade quickly under repeated high-temperature washing — cracking, lifting and fading within months rather than years. Embroidery has no surface layer to fail. If a garment is going to be washed at 60 degrees several times a week for two years, embroidery is not a preference, it is the only sensible option.
Identifying Roles Clearly
In a care home, residents, families and visiting professionals all need to identify roles quickly, and colour does that far more effectively than text.
- Use distinct garment colours per role — care staff, senior staff, housekeeping, kitchen, management — rather than relying on printed role titles.
- Keep the branded element identical across all roles so the organisation reads as one team.
- Consider that residents with impaired vision benefit from strong, consistent colour differentiation more than from small text.
- Fix the colour-to-role mapping in writing so it survives staff changes and future reorders.
Managing Turnover
Care has significant staff turnover, which makes reordering a recurring rather than one-off cost. Two habits reduce it substantially. Order a wider size spread than your current team needs, so a new starter is kitted from stock rather than triggering a fresh run. And record the exact garment codes, colours, logo dimensions, position and thread references from the first order — so a reorder eighteen months later reproduces the uniform rather than approximating it. Near-matching tunics across a shift look like an oversight to every visiting family member.
“"Uniform in care is not decoration. It is how a resident knows, at a glance, who is meant to be in their room."”
Minimums and Bulk Pricing
Orders start at 20 pieces with mixed sizes inside the run, which for most homes covers a full shift pattern plus spares. Bulk discounts reach up to around 40% as quantities rise, so a group operating several homes is materially better off ordering centrally than site by site. The free instant price calculator lets you compare one consolidated run against separate smaller ones.
Lead Times
Embroidered uniform typically takes around 10–15 working days from artwork approval, plus 2–5 working days tracked UK delivery. For a new home opening or a rebrand across sites, work backwards from the date and allow time for proofing across every garment type in the range.
Artwork
Supply vector artwork and confirm exact brand colours so thread can be matched as closely as the palette allows. Care organisation logos frequently include fine detail or small text that needs simplifying to stitch legibly — check at actual size before approving. Preview placement and scale in the free Design Studio, applying the same logo spec consistently across tunics, polos and fleeces so the range sits together.