Kit for a Corporate Away Day: Sizes, Sign-Off, Delivery
By The Velocity Wear Team
Away day kit that arrives after the away day is just expensive laundry. Work back from the event through 2-5 working days of tracked UK delivery and around 10-15 working days of production from artwork approval for screen printing or embroidery, nearer 15-20 for complex work. Production starts at artwork approval, and in a company the artwork approval date is set by your internal sign-off chain, not by the printer. That chain is almost always the longest lead time in the project.
Internal Approval Is Your Real Bottleneck
Map it honestly before you promise anyone a date. Brand or marketing will want to check logo usage and clear space. Someone may need to sign off wording if there is a strapline. Procurement may need a supplier set up. Finance may need a purchase order raised. Each of those is a person with a queue and a holiday allowance, and any one of them being away for a week moves your artwork approval date by a week.
The fix is unglamorous: name a single owner, get the logo files and brand rules at the start rather than after the first proof, and put every approver's name against a date in the plan. If you cannot get a decision inside a week, you do not have a timeline, you have a hope.
Sizing People You Cannot Measure
Ask, early, through a form, and make it the same form that confirms attendance so people fill it in once. Publish the actual size guide rather than asking for small, medium or large, because sizing varies between garments and people answer from what they wear at home. Offer a genuinely inclusive range at both ends, and make it easy to request without a conversation. Guessing sizes from a team photograph is a bad idea for obvious reasons and a worse one for reasons people will not tell you about.
Order a handful of spares across the common sizes. New starters appear between the order and the event, and someone always turns out to need a different fit.
- Name one owner and list every approver against a date before you commit to a delivery target.
- Collect sizes on the same form that confirms attendance, using the published size guide.
- Choose a garment people would wear on a weekend, not one that only works in the office.
- Consolidate delivery to a single office or the venue rather than to individual home addresses.
- Leave the year and the away day theme off the garment so it stays wearable afterwards.
Choose Something People Actually Keep
The test is simple. Would someone wear this on a Saturday if the logo were slightly smaller? A decent weight hoodie, a quarter-zip or a good quality sweatshirt passes. A thin printed tee with a giant chest logo does not, and it will be in a charity shop by autumn. Restraint reads as confidence: a small embroidered left-chest mark on a well-chosen garment looks considerably more expensive than a large print on a cheap one, and it costs less to produce than most people assume.
Embroidery is the right method for staff kit because it is durable and reads as premium, with the caveat that fine detail and small text need simplifying before they can be stitched cleanly. Screen printing suits bolder, limited-colour designs at volume with a setup cost per colour. DTF handles a detailed full-colour mark on a smaller headcount without per-colour setup.
Delivery: One Address Or Many
Hybrid and remote teams tempt you into individual home delivery, which multiplies the admin, the addresses you have to collect, and the number of things that can go wrong. If people are travelling to a venue anyway, ship everything to one address and hand kit out on arrival, which also makes a decent opening moment. If some staff genuinely cannot attend, post their kit afterwards as a small separate exercise rather than turning the whole order into a distribution project.
“"A small embroidered logo on a good garment outperforms a big print on a cheap one, every single time."”
Do Not Date The Kit
Printing the away day name and year guarantees the garment stops being worn the following month. Keep the branding to the company mark and, if you want a reference to the day, put it somewhere discreet like a sleeve or inside the neck. Undated kit also means leftovers become onboarding stock for new starters, which turns an over-order into an asset rather than a cupboard problem.
Minimums, Discounts And Getting Sign-Off Faster
Velocity Wear works from a 20-piece minimum per order with sizes mixed freely across the run, and bulk discounts reach up to around 40% as quantities rise, so pulling several teams or the whole company into one order is materially better value than departmental runs. A practical trick for speeding up internal approval: build the design in the free Design Studio and take a preview on the actual garment into the meeting, because approvers argue far less with something they can see than with a description. The instant price calculator gives you live pricing to put in front of finance at the same time.