Hoodies for Clothing Brands: size splits
By The Velocity Wear Team
You can mix sizes however you like inside the 50-piece minimum, which makes the size curve one of the few decisions in a drop that costs nothing to change. The trap is copying a generic curve. What sells is set by your customer and by the fit you chose, and an oversized block needs a different spread from a classic cut at the same labelled sizes.
Where should a brand start with 50 pieces?
Weight the middle and keep the ends deliberately thin on a first drop, because the ends are where unsold stock accumulates. Something in the region of five small, twelve medium, fifteen large, eleven extra large and seven double extra large is a sane opening guess for a unisex hoodie sold direct to consumer. Treat it as a hypothesis to be corrected rather than a formula. If your audience skews female, small and medium grow. If it skews toward streetwear buyers who size up on purpose, large and extra large take over the run. The wholesale hoodie minimum is per design, so the split itself is free to move.
How does fit change the curve?
Substantially, and this is the part brands underestimate. Fits run from classic through to oversized. An oversized body has more room through the chest and a longer drop shoulder, so a customer who wears large in a classic cut may well buy medium in your oversized piece and get the look they wanted. Order an oversized hoodie on a classic-cut curve and you will finish the season with double extra large sitting in a box. Publish real measurements on the product page rather than only letter sizes, because that is what stops returns before they start. Apparel Sizing and Fit covers the measurement points worth listing.
How do you correct the curve on the next drop?
Record two numbers per size, not one: how many you ordered and how many sold. The gap between them is your correction. Track sell-out order as well, since a size that clears in the first week was underordered even if the total looks fine. Then rebalance rather than simply scaling up, because a bigger run built on the same wrong shape produces a bigger pile of the wrong size. Brands running repeat drops through our clothing brand service tend to settle into a stable curve by the third release, and restocking a proven design is where that data pays for itself.
Does the split affect price or lead time?
Neither. Price follows quantity and specification, so 50 pieces across five sizes costs the same as 50 in one size, and the tiers from 50-99 up to 1,000-plus apply to the total rather than to any size within it. Production stays at 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval regardless of how many sizes are in the run. The one thing worth confirming early is the final split itself, because once blanks are being cut the numbers are fixed.
Returns are the other data source, and they are more honest than sales are. If one size keeps coming back with a comment about fit rather than about the garment, your published measurements and your actual measurements have drifted apart. Log the stated reason on every return, even roughly, and read the log before the next order rather than at the end of the year. Two seasons of that gives you a curve built on your own customers, which beats any general rule about where to weight a run.
Publish garment measurements rather than only a body size chart. A customer who measures a hoodie they already own and compares it against your numbers picks correctly almost every time, while one reading a height and weight table is guessing. Give chest width, body length and sleeve length for every size in the run, taken flat, and say how they were taken. It is half an hour of work on the sample and it pays for itself in the returns you never have to process.
