Budgeting a Bulk hoodie Order
By The Velocity Wear Team
Build the budget in five lines: garment price times quantity, decoration per position, one-off setup and digitising, labels and packaging, and delivery. Hoodies start at $31 a piece at the 50-piece minimum. The sample is £150 and credited back, so it is not a net cost on a real order. Budget the total, divide by the quantity, and use that figure rather than the headline price.
Where does the money actually go?
The garment is the largest single line and the one that scales directly with quantity. Fabric weight is the biggest lever inside it: a 450 GSM hoodie uses substantially more fleece than a 280 GSM one and prices accordingly. Cut matters less, though an oversized block uses more fabric than a regular one of the same size. Colour rarely changes the garment price unless you need a shade outside the stock range, which brings a dye lot with its own minimum.
Decoration is the second line and it behaves differently. Screen setup and embroidery digitising are one-off charges, so they represent a large share of a 50-piece budget and almost nothing on a 500-piece one. That is why a first small order often feels expensive per hoodie and a repeat at the same quantity feels reasonable: the setup already exists. Budget the setup separately in your head so you can see the effect clearly. A component-level view is in the real cost breakdown of custom hoodies.
How much does quantity change the total?
Per piece, a great deal. The discount rises through the tiers of 50 to 99, 100 to 249, 250 to 499, 500 to 999 and 1,000 plus, reaching up to 35 per cent off the 50-piece price at the top. In total, more is still more: 250 hoodies at a better unit price costs considerably more than 50 at the worst one. The tiers are only useful if you can genuinely use the extra pieces, and a stockroom of unworn hoodies is the most expensive saving there is.
The honest test is whether the surplus has a job. Staff turnover, new members, a second location, next season, sales stock: if any of those is real, moving up a tier is sound. If the extra hoodies exist purely to reach a better unit price, they are not a saving. Current tier figures are on the pricing page.
What gets left out of first budgets?
- Screen setup per colour per position, and embroidery digitising.
- Custom neck labels, care labels and swing tags if you are private labelling.
- Non-standard packaging, which is quoted per job.
- Delivery, which rises with garment weight and with distance.
- Import duty and taxes where the destination country applies them.
- Spare pieces, which cost the same as the ones people asked for.
Spares are the line people always skip and always need. Somebody gives a wrong size, somebody new starts, somebody ruins theirs in week three. Building five or six extras into the original quantity costs a fraction of what a second short run would, because a second run pays setup again and starts the 10 to 15 working day clock from scratch.
How should the budget be presented internally?
As a landed cost per hoodie, with the total alongside it and the assumptions written underneath: quantity, fabric weight, decoration positions and delivery destination. That format survives a finance conversation, because every question anyone asks is answered on the page. It also makes a change request easy to price: if somebody wants a second print position, you know exactly which line moves.
If the hoodies are being sold rather than issued, the landed cost per piece is also the number your pricing is built on, and the margin conversation starts there rather than at the quoted unit price. That is worked through in pricing hoodies for resale. Current garment options and from-prices are on the wholesale hoodies page.
