Brewery Merch and Taproom Kit: Two Different Orders
By The Velocity Wear Team
A brewery is really placing two different apparel orders that happen to share a logo. Merch is retail stock with a margin, a sizing curve and a genuine risk of not selling; taproom kit is uniform, bought to be washed, worn and replaced. Treating them as one order is the most common and most expensive mistake in the sector. Velocity Wear produces both online from a 20-piece minimum per order, so a small brewery can test a design without committing to a pallet of it.
Merch Is Stock, and Stock Ties Up Cash
Every tee sitting unsold on the taproom shelf is money that could have been malt. That reframes the whole decision. You are not asking what looks good, you are asking what a drinker will pay for and wear outside the building. Beer branding has an advantage here that most sectors would envy, because people genuinely want to advertise the beer they like. But they want to wear the design, not the corporate mark, and there is a real difference between the two.
The practical consequence is to start small and repeat what sells. A 20-piece run of a new design is a test. If it clears, reorder it and move up the quantity scale, where bulk discounts reach up to around 40%. If it sits on the shelf for six months, you learned something cheaply.
Retail Sizing Is Not Staff Sizing
This is where brewery merch orders go wrong most often. When you kit out staff, you order to the people you have. When you sell to the public, you order to a demand curve, and taproom demand skews heavily towards the middle and upper end of the size range. Ordering an even split across every size leaves you with a shelf of extremes and no mediums or larges by week three. Weight the run towards the sizes that actually move, and accept that you will occasionally disappoint someone at either end.
Can Art Does Not Print Like Can Art
Modern craft labels are gloriously complicated: gradients, six colours, textures, a foil effect that only exists because the can is printed on metal. Screen printing charges setup per colour, so lifting that artwork straight onto a tee at volume can get expensive fast. DTF carries no per-colour setup and handles detailed, full-colour artwork, which makes it the sensible route for short runs and for a range of several designs rather than one big run of a single design. If you want a design to be cheap at real volume, simplify it to one or two colours first and screen print that version instead.
Choosing What Goes in the Range
Ranges creep. Somebody suggests a beanie, then a tote, then a dog bandana, and suddenly there are eleven lines and no depth in any of them. A tight range that stays in stock outperforms a broad range that is permanently half sold out.
- Core tee: one design that represents the brewery rather than a single beer, kept in stock permanently and reordered.
- Seasonal or single-brew tee: tied to a release, deliberately finite, and the reason people check the shelf again.
- Hoodie: the highest value item on the shelf and the one where garment weight matters most. A heavier fleece justifies its price on the hanger.
- Staff kit: visually distinct from anything on sale, so customers can find someone to serve them.
- Festival and trade kit: what the team wears pouring at events, where you are one gazebo among forty and legibility at ten paces beats subtlety.
Taproom Staff Should Not Look Like Customers
The moment your best-selling tee is also the staff tee, every regular wearing it becomes a target for someone waving a card. Keep the two apart. Staff kit works well as a plain garment in a single consistent colour with a small embroidered mark, plus an apron for anyone pouring. Embroidery is durable, reads as uniform rather than promo, and survives the wash cycle that taproom kit gets subjected to. It also stops staff quietly recycling the uniform into their own wardrobe, which is a compliment but not a stock strategy.
“"Nobody buys a tee because they like your logo. They buy it because it says something about them that happens to involve your beer."”
Alcohol Branding and What Goes on the Garment
Apparel carrying alcohol branding sits inside a marketing framework that is not the same as putting a logo on a plumber's van, and the rules around responsible alcohol marketing and where it may appear are worth checking against current official guidance rather than assumed. The Portman Group publishes the industry code, and GOV.UK is the reference point for advertising and labelling questions. Check before you print several hundred of something, not after.
Timing a Release Around Production
Merch drops work best when they land alongside something else: a birthday, a collaboration, a beer festival, the first outdoor weekend of the year. That means working backwards. Production begins at artwork approval rather than order placement, screen printing and embroidery run around 10-15 working days from approval as qualitative guidance, and more complex jobs run nearer 15-20, with UK tracked delivery typically 2-5 working days after dispatch. Approve artwork early and the launch date looks after itself. Approve it late and you are selling summer tees in September.