Hoodies for Gyms: size splits
By The Velocity Wear Team
Never split a gym hoodie order evenly across sizes. Staff kit should be ordered to actual measured sizes with a few spares in the two most common. Member merch should be weighted heavily towards the middle of the range, with thin quantities at the extremes. Sizes mix freely inside the 50-piece minimum, so the split costs nothing except the decision itself.
Why does an even split go wrong?
Because people are not evenly distributed. Spread 50 hoodies across XS to 3XL at seven or eight apiece and the middle sizes are gone in a fortnight while the ends sit on a shelf for a year. Those unsold pieces cost exactly what the sold ones did, so an even split is not a neutral choice; it is a decision to spend part of the budget on stock nobody asked for. Weighting the middle is the correction, and it requires no extra cost at all.
Gyms have one advantage over most retailers here: the customers are in the building. You can ask, and people will answer, which removes almost all of the guesswork from the member side. Run a short form for a fortnight before ordering and let the responses set the ratio rather than a rule of thumb.
How should staff sizes be collected?
By measurement, not by letter. Publish the flat chest width and body length for the block you are ordering and ask each person to measure a hoodie they already own and wear comfortably. This eliminates the two failure modes: people naming the size they wore at a different weight, and people assuming your sizes match a brand they buy elsewhere. It takes each person two minutes and it is why staff orders come back right.
Tell them the cut as well. An oversized block measures larger at every size, so someone who is a large in a regular hoodie may want a medium in yours. Without that sentence you will receive a list of sizes collected against a completely different garment. The way each cut sizes on a real team is in fits and cuts for wholesale hoodies.
What ratio works for member merch?
Load the middle. In a mixed adult gym population the two or three central sizes will absorb well over half of any run, with tails at either end that get thinner fast. Order the extremes in small quantities, treat them as a service to the members who need them rather than as stock that has to sell quickly, and accept that you may hold a few for a while. That is very different from holding fifteen.
Women's and men's blocks are a separate question from sizes. If you offer both, each is a separate design against the 50-piece minimum unless the garment is genuinely unisex, so most gyms run one unisex block and publish the measurements clearly instead. Publishing those measurements also cuts the number of people who take the wrong size, which is the same problem retailers face and solve the same way, as set out in cutting apparel returns with better fit guidance.
What should be kept back as spare?
For staff, five or six pieces in the two most common sizes, held in a marked box rather than mixed into the hand-out. Gym staff turnover is steady, and handing a new instructor branded kit on day one rather than in two months is worth the small extra quantity. A second short run to cover three people would pay screen setup again and take another 10 to 15 working days.
For member merch, spares are just stock, so the question is whether the extra pieces move you into a better quantity tier. The discount climbs as quantity rises, up to 35 per cent off the 50-piece price at the top end, and that only helps if the surplus genuinely sells. Current per-piece figures are on the wholesale hoodies page, and the full kit range for fitness businesses is on our gyms and fitness page.
