Custom Workwear and Clothing Printing in Workington
By The Velocity Wear Team
Workington's custom clothing demand comes mainly from small engineering, fabrication and contracting firms, most of them well under twenty staff, working across west Cumbria and up the coast to the energy sites. Two things follow. A 20 piece minimum is easier to reach than those firms assume, and garment colour matters more than usual because so much of the work happens on sites shared with other contractors.
Heavy Industry in a Small Town
Workington made steel rail for the world's railways, and although that era has gone the engineering culture it left has not. Today the town supports fabrication, machining, plant maintenance and construction firms, a working port, and a considerable amount of contracting work feeding the energy sector further up the Cumbrian coast. What almost all of those businesses share is scale. They are small, they are busy, and nobody has a procurement department to work out a uniform policy.
Twenty Pieces Is Closer Than You Think
The most common reason a small Cumbrian firm never gets round to branded kit is a misreading of the minimum. It is 20 pieces per order, not 20 of each size. Sizes mix freely across a run. So a nine person firm ordering two polos and one fleece each is at 27 pieces before it has bought a single spare. A five person firm can get there by adding tees and a couple of spares for the lads who start in the spring.
That framing matters because the alternative, ordering little and often, is the expensive route. Screen print setup is charged per colour every time a run starts, so splitting one order into three means paying setup three times for the same design.
Do Not Wear a Colour That Means Something Else
Here is a genuinely practical point for anyone working on shared sites. High visibility yellow and orange carry meaning: they identify someone who is supposed to be seen. If you pick bright orange or yellow-green as your company polo colour because it stands out in a photograph, you have created ambiguity on a site where several contractors are working, and you have made your own high visibility clothing slightly less useful. Pick a company colour nobody could mistake for safety wear. Navy, charcoal, bottle green, burgundy and mid blue all mark you out clearly without borrowing meaning from something else.
Making a Small Firm's First Order Work
If you are ordering branded kit for the first time, this is roughly the shape of a sensible run.
- Two embroidered poly-cotton polos per person, in a company colour that could not be confused with high visibility wear.
- One embroidered fleece or softshell per person, since on this coast the outer layer is what people actually wear.
- A handful of printed tees for summer and workshop use, treated as consumables.
- Three or four spare pieces in the sizes you issue most, so a new starter does not trigger a whole new order.
- A written note of garment codes, colours and thread references, kept somewhere that is not one person's phone.
“"Your company colour should say who you work for. If it also says look out for me, you have taken a word out of another vocabulary."”
Working Up the Coast
A lot of west Cumbrian firms spend part of the year on the large energy and industrial sites north of the town, which usually means inductions, controlled access and working alongside contractors from all over the country. Clear, consistent company identification pays for itself there, not as advertising but as practical clarity about who is on site and who they answer to. Consistency is the point: one embroidered mark, one size, one placement, applied identically across polos, fleeces and jackets.
Weather Is the Deciding Specification
The west Cumbrian coast is wet and windy for a large part of the year, and it is a mistake to specify kit as though the fleece is an occasional extra. It is the main garment. Softshell and heavier fleeces earn their cost here, and the branding budget should follow: an embroidered mark on the outer layer will be seen a hundred times more often than one on a polo hidden underneath it.
Town, the Reds and Local Clubs
Rugby league and football both run deep in Workington, and Derwent Park and the local grounds sustain a network of junior and amateur sides. Playing shirts in polyester suit sublimation, which lays colour into the fabric with no surface layer to crack when players are pulled about, though it needs light bases to work. Club hoodies and travel wear are a separate order, better handled by screen printing when the design is simple and the run is large, or DTF when it is detailed or short.
Ordering Online for CA Postcodes
There is no shop to call into, which matters less than it used to. Brief and proof by email, use the free Design Studio to see the mark at real scale on the garment, and the instant price calculator to compare quantities before committing. Production starts at artwork approval, embroidery and screen printing typically run around 10 to 15 working days from there, and tracked UK delivery normally adds 2 to 5 working days. Bulk discounts improve up to around 40% as quantity rises, which is the argument for one considered order a year.