Custom Clothing Printing in Cheltenham: Kit for a Festival Town
By The Velocity Wear Team
Velocity Wear supplies printed and embroidered clothing to Cheltenham organisers, venues and hospitality businesses online, with tracked UK delivery. In a town whose calendar is built around racing, literature, jazz and science festivals, the pattern is consistent: high-contrast printed crew tees and hoodies for temporary teams, embroidered polos or softshells for the permanent staff who work every event, and a separate specification again for anything sold to the public.
Crew Kit Is Signage, Not Merchandise
The point of a crew tee is that a lost visitor can spot someone who works there. That means high contrast, a large clear role word on the back, and a colour the crowd is not already wearing. Black is the default choice and often the worst one, because at an evening event in a marquee everyone is in black.
Put the role on the back in large simple type: STEWARD, BAR, PRODUCTION, INFO. Put the event mark on the front, smaller. Resist the temptation to make crew kit look like merchandise. Merchandise is designed to be wanted. Crew kit is designed to be found.
Layering for a Gloucestershire Spring
The racing calendar peaks in March, when Prestbury Park can serve a bitter morning and a bright afternoon in the same shift. The literature and jazz festivals bring their own weather problems in different seasons. A single tee is not a uniform in those conditions, and staff will layer over it with whatever they own, which destroys the visual system you paid for.
Budget for a mid-layer. A printed hoodie or an embroidered softshell in the same identity keeps the team recognisable when the temperature drops, and it is the layer people keep afterwards. If money is tight, buy fewer branded tees and more branded mid-layers rather than the other way round.
Method by Run Size and Colour Count
- Screen printing for large single-colour or two-colour crew runs. Setup is charged per colour, so a two-colour design across 200 tees is easily the cheapest route.
- DTF for short runs, full-colour artwork or a late-added department, because there is no per-colour setup and no penalty for a run of 25.
- Embroidery for the permanent team's polos, fleeces and softshells, which are washed constantly across a whole festival season.
- Vinyl for role names or year dating on individual garments, applied per item.
- Sublimation only if you are on light polyester and want an all-over design, remembering it will not print white and needs a light base.
Volunteers, Returns and the Year Number
Most festival organisers eventually face the same argument: do you put the year on the shirt? Printing the year makes the garment feel like a keepsake and helps volunteers feel part of a specific edition. It also makes every leftover shirt worthless the following spring, and there are always leftovers.
A workable compromise is to year-date only the crew hoodies, which are fewer and more prized, and leave the bulk tee undated so surplus can be carried forward. If your volunteer kit is issued and returned rather than kept, drop the year entirely and spend the difference on better garments.
Hospitality, Independents and the Montpellier End
Cheltenham's independent bars, restaurants and shops around Montpellier and the Promenade tend towards restrained branding, and heavy logos look wrong against Regency frontages. Small tonal embroidery on an apron or a plain polo does more for that kind of business than a full-chest print ever will.
The town also carries a substantial professional and technology employment base, and that side of Cheltenham buys differently again: quiet corporate polos, quarter-zips and kit for conferences, recruitment fairs and open days rather than anything loud.
“"Crew kit is not a souvenir. If people want to steal it, you have probably designed it wrong."”
Working Back From Build Week
Production starts at artwork approval, not at order placement, and this is where event orders come unstuck. Screen printing and embroidery run to around 10 to 15 working days from approval, and UK delivery is typically 2 to 5 working days after dispatch. Crucially, you need the kit for build week and briefings rather than for the public opening, so count backwards from the day your team arrives on site.
Sign artwork off early even if final volunteer numbers are unconfirmed. Numbers can be topped up. Approval time cannot be recovered.
Ordering and Costs
Minimum order is 20 pieces per order with sizes mixed freely. The free Design Studio previews artwork on the garment at true scale, which matters for large back prints, and the instant price calculator shows live pricing as you change garment, method and quantity. Bulk discounts reach up to around 40% as quantities rise, so consolidating several departments into one order is usually worth the coordination.