Sizing a Clothing Order for Offices
By The Velocity Wear Team
Sizes can be mixed freely inside the 50-piece minimum, so an office should build the split from its own staff list rather than a standard curve. Collect actual sizes where you can, weight the middle of the range for the unknowns, and hold the surplus as starter stock instead of guessing at the extremes.
How do you split 50 pieces across an office?
The minimum is 50 per design, and those 50 can be any combination of sizes at no extra cost. That freedom is the whole point: a 38-person office orders 50 and the extra twelve become the starter pool. Browse what offices typically order on the corporate clothing page, and see how minimums work across products on the wholesale page.
A workable method is to list every named person with their size, then treat the remainder as buffer. If 38 staff give you 6 small, 14 medium, 12 large and 6 extra large, the buffer of twelve goes mostly into medium and large, because that is where new starters land most often. Nobody needs a spare 3XL sitting in a cupboard for two years.
Should staff pick their own size?
Yes, with a caveat. People know what they wear, but they answer against the brand in their wardrobe, and cuts vary. Send the size chart with chest and length measurements rather than asking for a letter. A form that says small, medium or large will get you guesses; a form that says chest 38 to 40 inches gets you measurements.
Offer a fit note as well. Polos and shirts run closer to the body than hoodies, and staff who want a relaxed fit should say so before the order goes in rather than after the box arrives. There is a longer treatment of this in our guide to apparel sizing and fit.
What do you do about leftover sizes?
Leftovers are only dead stock if the split ignored who actually works there. Kept deliberately, they are onboarding kit, and an office that hires all year should plan for that from the start.
- Label the surplus by size and store it where whoever handles inductions can reach it.
- Keep a simple count, so you know when the pool is down to the last few pieces rather than discovering it on someone's first morning.
- Weight the buffer to medium and large, which cover the widest range of body shapes.
- Avoid buying single units at the far ends of the range unless a named person needs them.
How do you keep the size run right on the next order?
Record what you issued, not what you ordered. Those two lists diverge within months as people swap sizes, leave or ask for a second shirt. An issue log turns the second order from guesswork into arithmetic, and it is the single most useful document an office can keep about its kit.
Note any size that consistently gets swapped up or down as well. If four people traded a medium for a large, the garment runs small on your team and the next split should shift a notch. Carry that note into the restocking guide approach of ordering to a known pattern rather than repeating the original breakdown.
One more practical point: mixed teams sometimes need both a men's and a women's cut. Those are usually separate designs for production purposes, which means two lots of 50, so decide early whether a unisex fit across the office is acceptable. Many offices choose unisex specifically to keep the order as one design and reach a higher discount tier, which rises to 35% at the largest quantities.
One habit worth adopting on a first office order: photograph the finished garment on two members of staff and keep the pictures beside the size chart. New starters then choose against a real person in the actual kit rather than against a diagram, which cuts the number of swaps considerably. It takes ten minutes on the day the boxes are opened and saves a conversation every time somebody joins.
