Hoodies for Retailers: cost
By The Velocity Wear Team
Hoodies start at $31 a piece at the 50-piece minimum and the rate falls as you climb the tiers, to a maximum of 35% off that starting figure. A retailer should ignore the headline and work in landed cost: the unit price plus freight, duty and any sample fee, spread across the run. That is the number your markup has to survive.
How do you get from unit price to landed cost?
Add everything that happens between the factory and your stockroom, then divide by the pieces. Freight to your country, duty and clearance where it applies, and the £150 sample fee if you have not absorbed it into a larger programme. On a 50-piece run those fixed costs spread thinly across very few garments; on a 500-piece run they almost disappear per unit. That asymmetry is why small orders feel disproportionately expensive to retailers who only compare quoted unit prices. The Real Cost Breakdown of Custom Hoodies itemises what sits inside the garment price itself, and our wholesale hoodies page carries the current from-price.
What do the volume tiers do to margin?
They do more than most retailers plan for. The steps run 50-99, 100-249, 250-499, 500-999 and 1,000 or more, with the discount measured down from the 50-piece price. Moving a single tier does not transform a business, but the cumulative difference across a season is the gap between holding full margin through a sale period and discounting into nothing. The practical question is not what is the best price but how much stock can I actually clear, because a deep tier reached by overbuying is a false economy paid for in markdowns.
Buy blanks or have them made?
The honest answer depends on how much of the garment you want to own. Blanks bought from stock have no minimum beyond the supplier terms, arrive quickly and are identical to what every other stockist can buy. A made-to-order run gives you the fabric weight you want from 280 to 450 GSM, the fit you want, and private label detail like woven neck labels, tear-out labels and swing tags that let the piece stand on its own in your shop rather than being a decorated blank. It costs more per unit and takes longer. Blank Hoodies UK works through the comparison properly.
What should a retailer avoid getting wrong?
Three things, all of them budget errors rather than production ones. Treating each colourway as free, when in fact a second colourway is a second design with its own 50-piece minimum. Setting a retail price from the unit quote and then finding freight has eaten the margin. And buying deep on an untested design because the tier looked attractive. Retailers stocking across several categories can compare the ranges on our full wholesale catalogue before committing a season budget to one garment type.
Sell-through is the figure that decides whether any of it worked. A run bought at a keen unit price that sits until markdown was expensive; a run bought at the entry tier that cleared at full price was not. Judge a hoodie order on what it returned across the season rather than on what it cost the day it was placed, and keep those numbers per design rather than in aggregate, because one strong seller will otherwise disguise two that never moved.
Own label or somebody else brand?
Stocking a garment you had made carries a different risk profile from buying a known brand wholesale. There is no established demand to trade on, so the first run is genuinely a test and should be sized like one, at or close to the minimum. What you get back is the whole margin rather than a share of it, control over the specification, and a product nobody can price-check against the shop two doors down. Most independents who go this way start with one category and expand only once a design has repeated.
Watch the second colourway in particular. It is the decision that most often turns a workable order into a marginal one, because it doubles the commitment at exactly the moment you know least about demand. Prove the garment in one colour, take the tier improvement that a larger single-colour run gives you, and widen the range only when the sales figures are asking you to.
