Samples Before Bulk: A Guide for Hotels
By The Velocity Wear Team
A sample costs £150 and that fee is credited against your bulk order, so a property that proceeds pays it once and gets it back. What you receive is the real garment in the real fabric with your real decoration on it. For a hotel the point is not to admire it: it is to put it through your own laundry cycle before 50 pieces are made.
What does the £150 sample actually get you?
A physical piece made the way the production run will be made, with your logo applied by the method you have chosen, whether that is embroidery, screen printing, DTF, sublimation or 3D puff. It is not a mockup and not a stock garment with a sticker on it. That distinction matters most on the details a render cannot show you, which is the whole argument in our comparison of renders and physical samples.
Which details should a housekeeping manager check first?
Wash it. Not once, but through the cycle the property actually uses, at the temperature the property actually uses, with the detergent already in the machine. Then look at four things: whether the decoration has lifted at the edges, whether the body has shrunk in length more than in width, whether the collar or cuff has lost its shape, and whether the colour has moved against an unwashed piece. Those four answers decide whether the garment belongs in your building.
- Wear it through a full shift, including the part where someone kneels on it.
- Check the seam behind the neck, which is what a guest sees when staff turn away.
- Hang it next to the existing kit and look at both under lobby lighting rather than daylight.
- Ask the person who will wear it every day, not the person signing the order.
How long does the sample stage add to the calendar?
Plan for the sample and the bulk run as two separate blocks. Production of the bulk order takes 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, and the sample sits before that, along with however long your own testing takes. Properties that approve a sample after a single wash lose very little time. Properties that want three weeks of real-world wear should build those three weeks into the launch date rather than discovering them late. Our full product range shows which items are available to sample, and the towel and linen range is specified and quoted per job, so a sample there is agreed as part of the quotation.
Is a sample worth it for a repeat product?
If you are ordering the identical garment in the identical colour from a previous run, no. If anything has changed, yes: a new colourway, a different decoration method, a new garment style or a new supplier all reintroduce the risk the sample exists to remove. The same logic applies when you are extending a programme into a new department, because a fabric that suits reception may be wrong for a kitchen pass. Get the size curve settled at the same time using our notes on sizing a hotel order.
One more practical use: a sample gives you something to show a general manager or an owner before money is committed. A garment in hand ends an argument that a PDF will keep going for a fortnight.
Be clear about what a sample cannot settle. One garment will not show you how fifty vary, and it will not predict a dye lot two years from now. What it does settle is the specification: fabric, fit, decoration method, placement and labelling. Once those are signed off, variation between pieces becomes a manufacturing tolerance rather than an open question. Properties that expect the sample to answer everything tend to sample three times and still order late, while properties that use it to lock a specification order once and move on.
Book the sample and the bulk run as one conversation rather than two. Telling us the intended quantity and the target delivery date at the sampling stage lets the production slot be planned around your opening rather than queued from scratch once approval finally lands. That is the difference between a launch that arrives on the date it was promised and one that slips a fortnight for no reason anybody can point to.
