Quality Checks on Bulk Hoodies
By The Velocity Wear Team
Pull ten garments at random across the size range and check five things: print position, print quality, stitching, measurements against the chart, and colour consistency between pieces. That takes twenty minutes and catches almost everything worth catching. Do it on the day the delivery lands, because a problem raised immediately is straightforward to resolve and one raised a month later is not.
What should you inspect first?
Print position, because it is the fault that affects every piece equally and the one that is hardest to live with. Measure from the shoulder seam down and from the centre front across, on garments from three different sizes. A left chest mark that is consistently two centimetres low across the whole run is a setup error. One garment out of ten sitting slightly off is within the tolerance any decoration process carries.
Then look at the print itself. Flex the fabric under the artwork: a properly cured screen print stretches with it and returns. Ink that cracks on the first flex has a curing problem and it will fail in the wash. Check the edges of the artwork for registration on multi-colour work, and check a dark garment for the underbase showing as a halo around the design. Hold two garments side by side in daylight and compare the colour, not under warm indoor lighting, which hides everything.
What counts as a genuine fault?
A fault is something outside specification: artwork in the wrong place or at the wrong size, a colour that does not match the approved reference, a measurement outside the chart tolerance, broken or skipped stitching, holes, or staining. Those are ours to fix, and they should be reported with photographs of the garment and its label. A run with a scattering of them is a production problem rather than bad luck, and it is worth counting how many of the ten you pulled are affected before you get in touch.
Normal variation is a different category. Slight differences in shade between dye lots, a millimetre or two of movement in print position, a small amount of loose fibre inside a brushed fleece, and minor differences in body length within the published tolerance are all inherent to garment manufacturing at volume. So is the fact that a size medium from one run measures fractionally differently from a medium in a run six months earlier. Where those lines sit is the thing to agree at quote stage rather than on delivery day.
How do you stop faults before they happen?
Approve a sample. At £150 credited against the bulk order it is the least costly inspection available to you, because it moves the argument to before production rather than after. Check the sample against the same five points you would check the delivery against, and keep it. A retained sample is the physical reference that a bulk run gets measured against, and without one every discussion becomes a matter of opinion.
The second defence is a precise brief. Most of what people call a quality problem is actually a specification that was never written down: nobody stated the print width, nobody named the Pantone, nobody said which chart the sizes should match. Fixing that is free and it happens before anything is made. Briefing a supplier for hoodies sets out exactly what to send, and the wider list of avoidable errors is in the mistakes almost everyone makes on a first order.
What should you do with the inspection results?
Write them down, with photographs, even when everything is fine. A short record per order builds into something useful: you learn which sizes run true, which colours reproduce well, and what to specify differently next time. It also means a repeat order can be placed against a known reference rather than from memory. Current specifications and per-piece prices are listed on the wholesale hoodies page, and the vocabulary used on an inspection report is defined in the apparel glossary.
