Handing Out Polo Shirts to a Team
By The Velocity Wear Team
Collect sizes once, in writing, against names. Order a small buffer in the common sizes while the run is open, because a top-up later is a fresh order with its own 50-piece minimum. Bag by name rather than by size, hand out from a list, and keep the spares in a cupboard you control. Distribution goes wrong through admin, not through manufacturing.
How do you collect sizes without chasing people for a fortnight?
Give a deadline and a default. A form with a name field, a size dropdown and a closing date gets most of the answers in two days; the rest come in because you said that anyone who has not replied gets a large. The default is the important half. Without one you spend a week chasing six people, and those six people are the reason your artwork approval slips.
Put a size guide next to the form. Polo fit varies by fabric — a piqué cotton and a performance knit sit differently on the same person — so chest measurements in centimetres beat asking people what they usually wear. If you have a sample in the office, leave it on a desk for a week and let people try it. The sample is £150 and credited against the bulk order, so it is doing two jobs at once.
Should the shirts be bagged by name or by size?
By name, if anyone other than you is handing them out. A box of mixed sizes means somebody digs through it, holds shirts up against people and leaves the pile unsorted for the next person. A bag with a name on it is handed over and that is the end of it. Individual bagging is a per-piece line on the quote, so decide before you order rather than buying polybags afterwards.
Bulk packing by size is fine when the shirts go to one location and one person distributes them. It costs less and it is easier to count on arrival. Split deliveries across sites are where name bagging earns its money, because nobody at the far end knows who is meant to get what.
How many spares should you order?
- 1Cover new starters for the period you expect the design to stay unchanged.
- 2Add replacements for damage, which on a worn uniform is a real and predictable number.
- 3Weight the spares towards the middle sizes, because that is where the demand lands.
- 4Keep a note of what is left, so the next order is based on a count rather than a guess.
Spares ordered inside the original run cost the garment price and nothing else, because the setup is already being paid for. Spares ordered later are a new order at the 50-piece minimum, which is why a handful of extra shirts now is far cheaper than five shirts in March. The pricing page shows how the bands work, and buying the buffer often nudges the whole order into a better one.
What do you do about the sizes you got wrong?
Keep them. Unclaimed shirts in odd sizes are next year new starters, and a polo in a drawer costs nothing to hold. What you should not do is reorder immediately to fix two or three people, because the minimum is 50 pieces per design and a three-shirt problem does not justify that. Note it, and fix the size curve on the next run instead. Size splits for a bulk polo order covers how to shape that curve, and briefing a supplier explains where the size information goes.
For anything ongoing, keep the specification written down: fabric, colour, collar and placket detail, decoration positions and artwork file names. The wholesale polo shirts page is where that specification starts, and having it on one page is what makes the next order a repeat rather than a rebuild.
