Care and Washing for Joggers
By The Velocity Wear Team
Branded joggers should be washed cool, inside out, and dried without high heat. Heat is what ruins them: it lifts print edges, shrinks cotton-rich knits and turns a brushed fleece into a pilled surface within a handful of cycles. The garment usually outlives the decoration, so the wash routine decides how long the kit still looks like kit.
What temperature should branded joggers be washed at?
A cool cycle, turned inside out, with the load not packed tight. Inside out protects the print from rubbing against everything else in the drum, and a looser load means less abrasion overall. Fabric softener is worth avoiding on brushed fleece because it coats the fibres and encourages them to mat. Tumble drying is the single most damaging step: air drying costs nothing and adds seasons to the garment.
What does heat do to the decoration?
Screen print and DTF are both sitting on the fabric surface. Repeated hot washing and hot tumbling work at the edges until they lift or crack, and once an edge lifts the rest follows quickly. Embroidery is far more tolerant because the design is stitched through the cloth rather than applied to it, which is why staff kit that goes through industrial laundry is usually embroidered. 3D puff sits proudest of all and is the most vulnerable to being crushed in a hot dryer.
Why do brushed joggers pill, and can you stop it?
Pilling happens when loose surface fibres tangle into small balls under friction. A brushed nap has by definition raised those fibres, so fleece pills more readily than loopback. You cannot eliminate it, but cool washing, no softener, no tumble drying and avoiding rough items in the same load will slow it considerably. If the joggers are destined for heavy laundering, specify loopback instead and accept that the garment will feel cooler and less cosseting in return for lasting longer on the rail.
What has to be on the care label?
Fibre composition and care instructions are the two things that genuinely matter, and there are rules about how they are presented depending on the market you sell into. If you are private labelling, the care label is made alongside your own woven or tear-out label rather than added afterwards, so it has to be specified at the quote stage. The requirements are summarised in care labels and clothing compliance basics and the label formats themselves in neck labels on wholesale joggers.
How do you get a whole team to follow it?
Assume they will not read the label, and design around that. Order enough pieces that nobody is washing their only pair on a hot cycle the night before a shift, which is easier than it sounds given the fifty-piece minimum and the tiers that take up to 35% off the fifty-piece price at volume. Pick embroidery over print for anything worn daily. Current from-pricing is $22 a piece at fifty on our wholesale joggers page, and the finishing terms used on spec sheets are defined in our glossary.
If you are selling rather than issuing the joggers, put the instruction where the buyer will see it. A short line on the swing tag, or a card in the bag, is read far more often than a label sewn into a waistband, and it sets expectations before the first wash rather than after the complaint. Tell people to wash cool and skip the dryer, and explain why in one sentence. Customers follow care advice when they understand what it protects, and ignore it when it reads as boilerplate.
