Planning Apparel for Seasonal Staff
By The Velocity Wear Team
Plan seasonal apparel around one rule: everything must be reissuable next season. That means no individual names, generous cuts, a small number of sizes, and a return process built in from the start. Seasonal staff wear the kit for weeks rather than years, so the garments are nowhere near end of life when the season ends, and buying them again is pure avoidable cost.
Design It to Be Reissued
The decisions that make a garment reissuable are all made before you order. Pick a style that will still be available next year, in a colourway that will still be produced, decorated with a logo rather than a date or a campaign line. Anything referencing a specific season is a garment with a twelve-week lifespan by design.
Choose a fabric weight that survives washing between seasons. Seasonal kit gets a hard, short life followed by a wash and a year in a box, which is a different pattern of wear from daily use and tends to punish very light garments.
Never Personalise Seasonal Garments
Vinyl and heat transfer make individual names easy and cheap, which is precisely the trap. A named garment belongs to one person for one season and then to nobody. If you want people identifiable, use a name badge that clips on. Badges are replaceable, the garment underneath is not.
Role labels are usually fine, since a garment marked for a role can go to whoever holds that role next year. Individual identity is what kills reuse.
Work Backwards From the First Shift
Seasonal hiring finishes late. That is a fact of seasonal hiring and no amount of planning changes it, so do not build a schedule that depends on knowing every name before you order.
Instead, work backwards from the first shift. Production starts at artwork approval, typically around 10 to 15 working days for screen printing and embroidery and nearer 15 to 20 for sublimation or more complex jobs, with UK tracked delivery usually 2 to 5 working days after dispatch. Approve artwork early, in a quiet month, so the only thing standing between you and the kit is the production window.
Sizing People You Have Not Hired Yet
You will be ordering before you know who is coming. Order against a size curve rather than a list of individuals, using last season's issue data if you have it and your permanent workforce's spread if you do not.
Weight the order towards your middle sizes and keep the extremes thin, then handle the outliers with a small top-up once people are hired. A top-up of a few pieces on an approved design is a much simpler order than a whole run.
“"Put a name on a seasonal polo and you have bought a garment with an expiry date printed on the chest."”
Build the Return Loop Before the Season Starts
A return process invented in the last week of the season will not work. Set it up before the first issue, and make it something a busy supervisor can run in ten minutes.
- Log what each person receives at issue, by garment and size, so the return is a check rather than an investigation.
- Collect kit at the final shift, not by post afterwards. Once someone has left, the garment is gone.
- Sort into reissue, repair and retire on the spot, because sorting a sealed box next spring never happens.
- Wash and store by size, labelled, so next season's issue starts with an accurate count rather than a rummage.
- Count what came back against what went out, and use that recovery rate to size next year's order.
Keep Seasonal and Permanent Kit Separate
Not visibly separate, since seasonal staff should look like everyone else to a customer, but separate in your stock records. If seasonal garments blend into the permanent store, they get issued to permanent staff, and next season you are short without knowing why.
One practical approach is to keep seasonal stock in its own physical location with its own count. It sounds fussy. It is the difference between knowing you need 60 more polos in March and finding out in June.
Order Once Rather Than Three Times
The seasonal pattern of ordering some now and more later, then a panic order in week two, is the most expensive way to buy the same garments. Each run carries its own setup and its own delivery, and none of them reach the volume where the pricing improves.
Consolidate into one order covering the season's expected requirement plus the shortfall from last year's returns. Velocity Wear works from a 20-piece minimum per order with sizes mixed freely within the run, and bulk discounts reach up to around 40% as quantities rise, so the difference between one run and three is genuinely material. Use the free instant price calculator to compare the two before you decide to stagger.
What Carries Over to Next Season
At the end of the season you should be left with three things: a counted stock of reissuable garments, a recovery rate, and an updated size curve. Those three inputs turn next year's ordering from an annual guess into a top-up. That is the entire point of treating seasonal apparel as a programme rather than a purchase.