Samples Before Bulk: A Guide for Offices
By The Velocity Wear Team
A physical sample of your office kit costs £150, and that £150 is credited against the bulk order when you go ahead. It is never free. What you get back is a finished garment in your colour with your logo applied by the method you chose, which is the only reliable way to judge fit, weight and how the branding actually reads on fabric.
What does a sample cost an office?
£150, credited in full against the bulk run. On a first order that is a small fraction of the total and it removes the two risks that hurt most: a fit that does not suit your team, and a logo that looked right on screen and sits wrong on cloth. The garments offices sample most are shown on the corporate clothing page, and pricing structure across the range is on the wholesale page.
The credit matters to finance as much as to you. Framed as a refundable step in the purchase rather than a separate spend, a sample usually clears internal approval without argument, especially against a run of 50 pieces or more.
What should you check when the sample lands?
Do not just look at it. Wear it, wash it, and then look at it again. The failures worth catching are the ones that only appear after a cycle in the machine.
- Fit against a real person, ideally two of different builds, rather than against a size chart.
- Logo scale and position at arm's length, because a chest mark that reads well up close can disappear across a room.
- Colour under office lighting as well as daylight; screens and strip lights disagree about most blues.
- Wash behaviour at the temperature staff will actually use, checking for shrinkage at the hem and any softening of the print edges.
- Fabric weight and hand feel, which decides whether people wear it voluntarily or leave it in a drawer.
Who inside the business should see it?
More people than approved the design. Whoever owns the dress code needs to see it on a body, because a garment that conflicts with the policy is a problem that only becomes visible once it exists. Whoever handles onboarding should see it too, since they are the person who will explain it to every new starter.
Get one or two staff outside the decision group to try it for a day. Their verdict on comfort is more useful than any specification sheet, and it is cheap to collect before a run of 50. Circulating the sample is also how you surface sizing objections in advance rather than on delivery day.
Is a mockup enough instead?
A mockup is enough to agree layout and to get internal sign-off on how the logo sits. It cannot tell you weight, drape, how a stitched edge feels against the neck, or whether a colour is a shade greener in the flesh. Our comparison of mockups and physical samples sets out exactly where a render stops being reliable.
For a repeat of something you have already ordered, a mockup is usually plenty. For a new garment, a new decoration method or a first order with a supplier you have not used, order the sample. And when you are still comparing suppliers, sampling is one of the fairest tests available, as covered in our guide to picking a clothing supplier.
Build the time in. A sample cycle adds roughly two weeks before the 10 to 15 working day production window even starts, so an office working to a fixed start date needs to begin earlier than it thinks.
Treat the sample as a decision document rather than as a garment. Photographs of it on a person, a note of how it behaved in the wash and the agreed specification alongside make a far stronger case to whoever signs off the spend than a price per piece on its own. That paperwork becomes the reference for the next order too, so the fortnight is not time spent only once.
