Custom Apparel With a Low Minimum: What 20 Pieces Actually Buys You

Ask ten apparel manufacturers for a quote on 20 hoodies and most will not reply. The ones that do will quote you a per-piece price that makes the order pointless. Minimum order quantity is the single biggest barrier between someone who wants to start a clothing brand and someone who has one — and almost nobody explains why it exists.

Why minimums exist at all

A minimum is not a manufacturer being difficult. It is the point at which the fixed costs of a production run stop dominating the per-piece price.

Every run carries setup that costs the same whether you order 20 pieces or 2,000: digitising artwork for embroidery, burning screens for screen printing, setting up the machine, matching colour, cutting a marker, and the first article that gets checked and thrown away. Spread across 500 pieces, that setup is invisible in the unit price. Spread across 20, it is most of it.

Fabric is the other half. Mills sell greige and dyed fabric in rolls, and dye lots have minimums of their own. A manufacturer taking a 20-piece order in a custom colour is either eating a fabric minimum or working from stock colours. This is why low-minimum runs in standard colours are straightforward and low-minimum runs in a bespoke Pantone are not.

"Low minimum" and "no minimum" are different products

This distinction matters more than any price comparison, and it is where most people ordering their first run go wrong.

**No minimum** means print-on-demand. A platform holds blank stock, prints one piece when someone orders it, and ships it. It is genuinely excellent for testing a design with zero inventory risk. What you cannot do is choose the garment: you pick from the blanks that platform stocks, you cannot change the fabric weight, you cannot put your own woven label in the neck, and your margin is whatever is left after their per-unit price.

**Low minimum** means real manufacturing at a small scale. The garment is cut and sewn for you, so the fabric weight, the fit, the neck label, the tags and the packaging are all yours. The trade-off is that you are committing to a run and holding the stock.

If you want to test whether a design sells, use print-on-demand. If you want a product that is actually yours, you need a manufacturer — and then the question is how small a run that manufacturer will take. Ours is 20 pieces per design, which is where this gets useful.

What changes at 20, 50, 100 and 500

These are the tiers our own price calculator runs on, so they are the real breakpoints rather than illustrative ones.

1. 1**20–49 pieces.** Base wholesale pricing. This is a first drop, a club squad, a staff rollout for a small team, or a sample run you intend to sell. Everything is available: any decoration method, mixed sizes, custom labels.
2. 2**50–99 pieces.** Roughly 10% off the unit price. This is also the point where screen printing overtakes DTF on cost for a single-colour design, because the screen setup finally has enough pieces to spread across.
3. 3**100–249 pieces.** Roughly 20% off. Multi-colour screen printing becomes sensible. If you are reordering a design that sold, this is usually the tier to jump to.
4. 4**250–999 pieces.** 28% to 35% off. Custom fabric weights and dyed-to-match colours start to be worth the lab dip approval, because the fabric minimum is no longer the constraint.
5. 5**1,000+ pieces.** Up to 40% off, which is the deepest tier we run. At this volume the setup cost per piece is effectively zero and you are paying for fabric, labour and decoration.

The gap between 20 and 1,000 is about 40% on the unit price. That is a real difference, but it is much smaller than most people assume — and it is far smaller than the difference between having a product and not having one.

Mixed sizes are the question nobody asks

A 20-piece minimum is only useful if the 20 pieces can be the sizes you actually need. A squad is not twenty mediums.

Mixed sizes inside the same run cost nothing extra with us, because the minimum is per design rather than per size. Twenty hoodies can be two S, six M, eight L, three XL and one 3XL. Individual names and numbers are the same: a per-garment name change is included, so every piece in a 20-piece run can be different.

Ask this explicitly when you compare quotes. A "20-piece minimum" that turns out to be 20 pieces per size is a 120-piece minimum wearing a disguise.

Where a low minimum genuinely costs you

Being straight about the limits is more useful than pretending there are none.

• **Custom colours.** A dyed-to-match brand colour needs a lab dip and a fabric minimum well above 20 pieces. At 20 you are choosing from stock colours — a good range, but a range.
• **Per-piece cost.** You are paying the base tier. If price per unit is the only thing that matters, a low minimum is the wrong tool.
• **Fully bespoke patterns.** A brand-new block or pattern carries development cost that 20 pieces cannot absorb. Modifying an existing fit is fine; drafting from scratch is not.
• **Freight economics.** Shipping 20 pieces costs more per piece than shipping 200. On a small run, freight is a visible share of landed cost, so ask for it as a line item rather than a bundled number.

How to order a small run without wasting it

1. 1Pick one garment and one design. Twenty pieces split across three products is three runs of seven, and every one of them pays full setup.
2. 2Use stock colours for the first run. Prove the design sells before you commit to a dye lot.
3. 3Order the size curve you expect to sell, not an even spread. Most ranges are heaviest at M and L.
4. 4Approve a digital mockup before production, and ask for a photo of the first piece off the line.
5. 5Reorder into the next tier once it sells. The 50-piece tier is a 10% saving on something you already know works.

What we can make at 20 pieces

Every range on the site runs from the same 20-piece minimum per design, in 10–15 working days from artwork approval. Hoodies from $31 a piece, t-shirts from $13, polo shirts from $18, caps from $12, joggers from $22 and tracksuit sets from $53. Jackets and outerwear are quoted by construction, and corporate uniforms start at $20 a piece.

Wholesale towels sit apart from that: they are woven rather than cut and sewn, so towels carry their own 50-piece minimum and their own per-size pricing.

If you want a number for your specific run, the price calculator gives you one immediately, or send the design and quantities for an itemised quote.