Restocking Branded Kit for Charities
By The Velocity Wear Team
Yes, a charity can repeat the same design as often as it likes. The artwork and the digitised embroidery file stay on record, so a repeat run skips most of the setup work and goes to production faster than the first. The minimum still applies at 50 pieces, and the production window is still 10 to 15 working days once the repeat is approved.
Can a charity repeat the same design next year?
It is the most economical thing a charity can do with its clothing budget. Every new design starts the setup work again, so an organisation that changes its shirt annually pays for that change twice over, once in setup and once in the leftover stock that suddenly looks out of date. Leave the year off the print and last season’s surplus becomes this season’s opening stock. Can I reorder the same design later covers what we keep on file between runs.
Will the second run match the first?
Close, and closer still if you help it. Inks are mixed to the same reference and the garments come from the same specification, but dye lots on blank garments do shift slightly between production batches, which is a fact of textiles rather than a supplier choice. Two things reduce the gap. Keep a piece from the first run and send it in as the reference. And order in fewer, larger runs, because a single order of 200 cannot mismatch itself while four orders of 50 across two years might.
How much kit should you hold between runs?
Enough to cover the next two events plus the people who join in between. Storage is usually free for a charity in a way it is not for a retailer, so the calculation is mostly about cash rather than space. The tiers run 50 to 99, 100 to 249, 250 to 499, 500 to 999 and 1,000 upwards, with up to 35 per cent off the 50-piece price at the top, so holding a year of stock is often cheaper in total than three small runs. When to reorder and how much buffer to hold works through the trade-off, and the charities and fundraising page lists what we make for this sector.
Does a repeat order still need 50 pieces?
It does. The minimum is not a first-order rule, it applies to every run, so topping up with twelve large shirts is not something we can produce on its own. Plan repeats around the minimum instead: when stock of your best-selling size drops below what one event consumes, place a full run rather than waiting until the cupboard is empty. Ordering routes and timings are on the wholesale page.
What should trigger the next order?
A stock level, not a calendar date. Decide in advance how many pieces of your busiest size constitute a reorder point, then place the run when you cross it. For most charities that threshold is whatever one full event consumes, because dropping below that means the next event cannot be covered. Counting the cupboard twice a year takes half an hour and removes the scramble entirely.
Build the lead time into the trigger as well. Production is 10 to 15 working days once the repeat is approved, with transit after that, so the reorder point has to sit roughly a month ahead of the moment you actually run out. A charity that orders at the point of the last shirt leaving the box has already been out of stock for a month by the time the new run arrives.
Treat the repeat as a chance to correct rather than simply to copy. The split that went out last time is now evidence: if two sizes are still sitting in the cupboard and one emptied in a morning, shift the weighting before reordering. The design stays the same, which is what keeps the setup cost down, but the quantities behind it should move every time.
