Custom Clothing Printing in Wakefield and the Five Towns
By The Velocity Wear Team
For custom clothing printing in Wakefield, two very different jobs dominate: sublimated rugby league kit for a district that takes the sport seriously, and embroidered uniform for its food production and logistics sites. Velocity Wear produces both from a 20-piece minimum with mixed sizes, delivered across Wakefield and the Five Towns on a tracked service.
Three Professional Sides Within a Few Miles
Very few places in England match the rugby league density of the Wakefield district. Trinity play in the city itself, with Castleford and Featherstone close enough east that plenty of families follow more than one. Underneath the professional game sits an amateur and junior structure running across Normanton, Knottingley, Pontefract and Ossett, and that is where most kit orders actually originate: under-9s through to open age, several teams per club, all needing to look like the same organisation on the same Sunday morning.
Sublimation and What It Will Not Do
Contact sport is the reason sublimation exists. The dye becomes part of the polyester fibre rather than sitting on top of it, so there is no printed layer to crack, peel or scuff away in a tackle. The constraints are absolute though, and worth understanding before anyone starts designing. It works on polyester only, on light or white bases only, and there is no white ink involved at any stage. A dark shirt is achieved by printing the dark colour as part of the design, and anything you want to appear white has to be unprinted fabric.
Numbers: Print Them In or Add Them On
Squad numbers are where clubs most often paint themselves into a corner.
- Sublimated numbers look best and last longest, because they are part of the fabric rather than applied to it.
- They also cannot be changed, so a shirt made for number 7 stays number 7 until it wears out.
- Vinyl numbers and names can be applied to a plain sublimated shirt instead, which lets a squad be renumbered each season.
- For junior sides with fast turnover the flexibility usually beats the finish; for a first team, the reverse.
- Decide before artwork approval, because it changes how the shirt is laid out.
“"Sublimation is permanent in every sense. That is the whole point, and it is also the whole problem."”
Food Production Has Its Own Rules
The district's other major apparel buyer is food manufacturing. Pontefract's liquorice trade is the famous end of it, but Wakefield carries a broad base of food processing, packing and cold storage. Kit for those environments is judged on a different criterion altogether: anything that could detach and end up in product is a problem, not an inconvenience. That pushes the work towards embroidery, with thread ends trimmed and backing finished properly, and away from applied vinyl. Many sites also launder centrally at high temperature, which finishes off printed logos within a season. Read the site's own clothing policy before specifying anything.
Supporter Kit Usually Pays for Playing Kit
The practical way most amateur clubs fund a kit refresh is to sell alongside it. Screen-printed supporter tees and hoodies carry a better margin than playing kit and can sit in the same run, lifting the combined quantity onto a stronger point of the discount curve. Bulk discounts reach up to around 40% as quantities rise, so a club ordering match kit, training tops, coaching softshells and supporter merch as one order rather than four is saving considerably more than admin time.
Working With the 20-Piece Floor
Twenty pieces per order, sizes mixed, garment types mixed. For a junior team that is one squad plus spares. For a club it is easily cleared by combining age groups, which also keeps the design consistent across them, something that quietly matters more than people admit when the under-11s and the under-15s line up together. Run the numbers through the free instant price calculator before you fix what you charge members.
The Thing That Always Delays a Club Order
Sponsor artwork. Every time. Production begins at artwork approval, so a club waiting on a logo from a local sponsor is spending its own lead time. Collect every sponsor file in vector format before anyone starts laying out a shirt. Sublimation and complex jobs run nearer 15–20 working days from approval, screen printing and embroidery around 10–15, with 2–5 working days tracked delivery after dispatch. Preview the layout in the free Design Studio and check sponsor placement against your league's kit regulations while it is still cheap to move things.