Garment Poly Bags vs Mailing Bags: Which Do You Need?
By The Velocity Wear Team
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Custom mailing bags for clothes and garment poly bags do different jobs. A mailing bag, or poly mailer, is the outer shipping bag: sealed once with an adhesive strip and addressed for the courier. A garment bag is the inner resealable bag that protects and presents the item. Velocity Wear makes the garment bag, frosted and printed with your logo, from 50 per design.
What is the difference between a poly bag and a poly mailer?
The mailer faces the outside world and the garment bag faces the customer. A poly mailer is an opaque, envelope-style bag with a peel-and-stick adhesive strip across the flap. It takes the address label, the scuffs from sorting belts and the rain on the doorstep, then gets torn open and usually thrown away. A garment poly bag sits inside it, holds one folded piece, and is made to be opened, closed and kept. The two closures are compared properly in zip seal versus self seal.
Ours is that inner bag, the custom printed garment bag: frosted film, a resealable zip seal, your logo on the face, a punched hang hole and size stickers. It is not designed or sold as a shipping mailer, and we do not make mailers. In practice that keeps the two orders separate: the mailer comes from a packaging supplier, the garment bag from us.
| Question | Garment poly bag | Mailing bag (poly mailer) |
|---|---|---|
| Where it sits | Inside, around one garment | Outside, around the whole parcel |
| How it closes | Zip seal that reopens | Adhesive strip, sealed once |
| What it carries | Your logo, size sticker, hang hole | Courier label and address |
| After delivery | Kept for storage or a return | Torn open and usually discarded |
| Main job | Protect and present the garment | Survive the courier network |
| Who supplies it | Velocity Wear, printed to your artwork | A packaging or mailer supplier |
Do online clothing brands need both?
Most do. The mailer takes the punishment of the courier network and carries the address. The garment bag inside keeps the piece clean if the mailer splits, stops the fabric touching a wet or dirty outer bag, and gives the customer something to reseal a return in. Brands that ship in boxes still bag the garment for the same reasons. The combination is covered from the brand side in polythene bags for online clothing brands.
The exception is stock that never passes through a courier. Garments delivered in bulk to a stockist, or carried to a market stall or gig, need the garment bag but not a mailer, and a hang hole matters more than an address panel.
Can a printed garment bag replace a mailer?
Not well. A zip seal is meant to reopen, so it shows no sign of tampering, and a bag sized snugly around a folded garment leaves little flat space for a courier label. Using the garment bag as the only layer also means your printed logo takes every scuff in the sorting depot. Put a mailer around it and the printed bag arrives looking the way you designed it.
Which layer should carry your logo?
If the budget covers branding one layer, brand the one the customer keeps. A plain mailer does its job just as well as a printed one, while a printed garment bag is what gets opened at the kitchen table and used again. Printing both is fine too; just keep the artwork consistent so the two read as one brand. The hang tags and packaging guide weighs up where packaging spend earns its keep for a new label.
What should you send for a garment bag quote?
Tell us the garments going in each bag, how many bags you need per design, your logo file, and where and when they need to arrive. Mention the mailer you already use, so we can check the bagged garment will sit inside it. The spec is on our printed polythene bag page, and the full guide to printed polythene bags covers sizing, samples and the minimum.