Sizing a Clothing Order for Events
By The Velocity Wear Team
Split crew kit from a real headcount and merch stock from a weighted curve. Sizes mix freely inside the 50-piece minimum, so there is no penalty for an uneven run. Crew sizing should be collected person by person; merch sizing should lean heavily on medium and large, which is where most of a crowd sits.
What size split works for festival crew?
Ask them. A crew list is a finite, named group, and a shared form with chest measurements rather than letters gets you an exact answer in a day. Then order to that list plus a handful of spares. The events and festivals page covers the garments crews usually wear, and the wholesale page explains the minimum that the split has to fill.
Build the spares into the middle of the range and allow for late additions. Every event recruits people in the final fortnight, and a steward without a branded shirt is a steward the public does not recognise. Five or six extra pieces across medium and large covers it.
How should merch sizing differ from crew sizing?
Completely. Merch is sold to strangers, so you are predicting a crowd rather than dressing a list. The practical approach is to weight the run towards the middle and stock the extremes thinly.
- 1Put the bulk of the run into medium and large, which clear fastest on any stall.
- 2Carry small and extra large in roughly equal, smaller quantities.
- 3Stock extra small and the largest sizes only in single figures unless you know your audience skews that way.
- 4Keep a written record of what sold out first, because that record is the only real data you will ever have for next year.
Our guide to apparel sizing and fit goes further into how cut and fit affect which sizes move, which matters more on a stall than most organisers expect.
How do you stop the last day ending in a pile of XS?
By not ordering many in the first place, and by planning what happens to what is left. Unsold stock at a recurring event is simply next year's opening stock, provided the design carries no date. At a one-off, it is a loss unless you have a plan for it.
Two habits help. Price down the stragglers on the final afternoon rather than carrying them home, and keep the artwork generic enough that leftovers work as crew kit, giveaways or partner gifts afterwards. Both are decisions made at the design stage, not on the last day.
Can you fix a bad split after the order is placed?
Before production starts, usually yes. After approval, the run is cut to the specification and the split is fixed. That is one more reason to settle the size list before requesting the proof rather than after.
If the split turns out wrong and the event repeats, correct it next time rather than placing a small top-up. The minimum is 50 per design on a restock as much as on a first order, so a top-up of twelve smalls is not available. Our guide to minimum orders for events explains how that counting works across designs and colourways.
Where a size correction is genuinely needed and the quantity is there, it is worth combining it with whatever else the next edition requires. A larger combined run moves up the discount tiers, which reach 35% at the top, and arrives in a single dye lot so the crew still match.
Decide early whether the run includes a separate fitted cut. Two cuts are two designs and therefore two lots of 50, which is manageable for merch at a large event and rarely worth it for a crew of thirty. Where the budget stretches to one only, a unisex fit with an honest size chart published next to it does the job and keeps the order as a single run.
