Custom Clothing Printing in Exeter and East Devon
By The Velocity Wear Team
For custom clothing printing in Exeter, demand splits between term-dated student and club orders and year-round rural workwear across East Devon. Velocity Wear produces both from a 20-piece minimum with mixed sizes, delivered across Exeter and Devon on a tracked service.
Two Clocks
The University of Exeter drives a large, sharply seasonal demand — society and course hoodies, sports club kit, freshers merch — concentrated into narrow windows around term dates. Rural Devon runs on a completely different clock: farm, land management and rural trade businesses order embroidered outerwear when kit wears out, spread evenly through the year. The two rarely collide, but each has its own failure mode.
Student and Society Orders
The recurring problem here is not production but collection — gathering sizes, names and money from a large group of people who respond slowly.
- Order in the preceding term where possible, since committees disperse over vacations and reassemble against a tight deadline.
- Collect sizes with an actual size guide available and state whether people should size up, since hoodies are often worn oversized.
- Name lists on the back are printed rather than embroidered, and every spelling needs checking against a confirmed list before approval.
- Mixed sizes within the 20-piece minimum let a full membership range go into one run.
Rural East Devon
For farm and rural trade businesses, the specification is a durability one. Embroidered gilets, fleeces and softshells in darker colourways, on heavier fabrics, worn outdoors year-round in wet country. Embroidery rather than print throughout — a printed logo on a garment that is soaked, dried and washed constantly will crack, and a stitched one will not. Softshells earn their higher cost quickly, because wind resistance matters as much as insulation.
Independents
Exeter's independent retail and hospitality scene orders short runs — twenty to sixty pieces — where DTF usually wins on cost, since there are no per-colour screen setup charges to spread across a small quantity. Screen printing takes over as volume climbs with a limited palette. For anything sold rather than given away, a heavier ringspun blank does as much work as the print.
“"The slow part of a student order is never the printing. It is the twelve people who have not sent their size."”
Minimums, Cost and Lead Times
Orders start at 20 pieces with sizes mixed freely inside the run, and bulk discounts reach up to around 40% as quantities rise. Production runs around 10–15 working days from artwork approval for screen printing and embroidery, or nearer 15–20 for sublimation and complex jobs, plus 2–5 working days tracked delivery into Exeter, Exmouth, Honiton and across East Devon. Run quantities through the free instant price calculator and preview placement in the free Design Studio before approving.