Ordering Apparel for an Open Day

Open day apparel has one job: telling a visitor who to approach. Distinguish roles by colour rather than wording, put the role on the back as well as the front, and keep the design undated so the same kit works next year. Order once for the whole event across every department rather than department by department.

The Job the Garment Has to Do

An open day puts unfamiliar people into an unfamiliar building. They are looking for someone official, usually while slightly lost and often while trying not to interrupt. Everything about the apparel should serve that moment.

This is why elegant, subtle open day kit tends to fail. A tasteful tonal logo on a grey tee looks good in a photograph and is invisible from the other side of a hall. Restraint is the wrong instinct here.

Colour Reads at Ten Metres, Text Reads at One

Here is the practical rule worth designing around. At distance, a visitor perceives colour and shape only. Text of any size is unreadable until they are close enough to speak to you, at which point they no longer need it.

So encode the important distinction in colour. If you have student guides, academic staff and admissions staff, give each group a genuinely different colour rather than the same shirt with different wording. A visitor learns the code from a sign at the entrance in two seconds and then navigates the whole day by it. Wording alone forces them to approach someone to find out whether that person was the right one to approach.

Put the Role on the Back Too

Front-only printing assumes people approach you face on. In a corridor, a queue or a busy hall, most of the time somebody spends deciding whether to ask you a question is spent looking at your back.

A large, plain word across the shoulders solves it. Keep it to one word if you can. Something like GUIDE or HELP is more useful than a job title, because visitors are not parsing your organisational structure, they are looking for permission to interrupt someone.

“"Visitors do not read your open day shirt. They recognise it, which is a different thing and happens ten metres earlier."”

Sizing for Volunteers You Have Not Met

Open day teams are typically part volunteer, part staff, and the list is never final until close to the day. That makes size collection awkward, but a few habits reduce the pain:

• Use unisex fits to cut the number of size lines you have to manage across a large, changeable group.
• Weight the curve towards the middle sizes and hold a handful of extras at each end.
• Set a cut-off for size submissions and order to what you have, rather than waiting for the last few responses.
• Sizes mix freely inside the 20-piece minimum, so an uneven distribution costs you nothing.
• Keep spares unallocated so somebody who arrives on the day can still be dressed correctly.

Making the Kit Work Again Next Year

Open days repeat. If the shirts carry a year, a specific date or a campaign strapline that will change, you are buying new ones every single time for no benefit to the visitor.

Keep the design to the organisation mark and the role. Then the same kit covers next year's open day, plus applicant days, campus tours and anything else where somebody needs to be identifiably official. That reuse changes the economics of ordering something decent rather than something disposable.

One Order Across Departments

Large open days are run by many teams at once, and each tends to order its own kit. The result is five variations on a brand colour and five separate low-quantity orders.

One consolidated run fixes both problems. Bulk discounts reach up to around 40% as quantities rise, so a combined order is meaningfully cheaper per piece, and it produces one consistent colour set across the whole site. If different roles need different colours, that is still one order with several colourways, not several orders.

Working to a Date That Cannot Move

An open day is fixed months in advance and will not wait. Screen printing typically runs around 10-15 working days from artwork approval, and it is well suited to this kind of bold, limited-colour design, with setup charged per colour. DTF avoids per-colour setup where the artwork is more detailed. Add tracked UK delivery of 2-5 working days after dispatch, and remember production starts at artwork approval. Preview the layout in the free Design Studio, checking the back print at the size it will actually be worn, then use the instant price calculator to sanity-check the combined quantity.