Festival and Event Merch: Crew Kit, Artist Tees and Stall Stock
By The Velocity Wear Team
Festival and event merch has two distinct requirements: functional crew kit that identifies staff at a glance, and stall stock designed to sell. Velocity Wear produces both from a 20-piece minimum with mixed sizes, using screen printing for volume runs and DTF for detailed short runs, delivered on a tracked UK service with bulk discounts up to around 40%.
Crew Kit Has One Job
Crew clothing exists so that a member of the public, a contractor or a security team can identify staff instantly, in poor light, at distance, in a crowd. That makes it a legibility problem rather than a design one.
- High contrast beats subtlety. Dark text on a bright shirt, or the reverse, reads across a field; tonal designs do not.
- Large, simple back text — CREW, SECURITY, BAR, MEDICAL — does more work than any logo.
- Different roles should be visually distinct at a glance, usually by garment colour rather than by print detail.
- Order generously. Crew numbers grow late, shifts change, and shirts get lost or ruined across a weekend.
Stall Stock Is a Retail Product
Merch sold at an event competes with everything else the customer could spend on that day, and it is bought on impulse. That rewards a good blank — a heavier ringspun tee or a substantial hoodie justifies a higher price and gets worn afterwards, which is where an event's ongoing visibility comes from. Thin blanks sell at low prices to people who regret it, and rarely reappear.
Forecasting Quantities
This is the hardest part and there is no formula for it. What helps is structure: order a size spread weighted towards the middle of the range rather than evenly, keep the design count small so you are not spreading stock thin across many variants, and treat a sell-out as a better outcome than a van full of leftovers. Bulk discounts up to around 40% mean scaling up a single strong design usually beats hedging across four weak ones.
“"Selling out is a good problem. Storing three hundred unsold shirts until next summer is not."”
Timing Is Everything
Production starts on artwork approval — roughly 10–15 working days for screen printing, nearer 15–20 for sublimation and complex jobs, plus 2–5 working days tracked UK delivery. Festival dates do not move, lineups and sponsor artwork firm up late, and summer is the busiest period across the industry. The practical answer is to lock artwork as early as the lineup allows and approve proofs the day they arrive.
Artwork
Supply vector artwork where possible, confirm exact colours rather than describing them, and check any sponsor or partner logos at actual size — these routinely arrive as low-resolution files and are the most common cause of a delayed proof. Preview placement and scale in the free Design Studio, and model quantities and methods in the instant price calculator before committing.