What Restaurants Pay for Branded Clothing
By The Velocity Wear Team
Restaurant uniform starts at $18 a polo shirt, $20 for a corporate uniform piece, $13 for a t-shirt and $12 for a cap, all at the 50-piece minimum with decoration included. Outer layers such as jackets are quoted per job. The figure that actually matters to a venue is cost per head per year, not cost per shirt.
What does a restaurant pay per piece?
Polos and corporate pieces are what most front of house teams wear, and they sit in the high teens to low twenties per piece at the smallest quantity. Printed tees are cheaper and suit casual venues and back of house. Caps sit lowest of the branded items and are often the only thing a kitchen wears with a logo on it.
Those are from-prices at 50 pieces. As the count rises the per-piece figure falls through the tiers to a maximum of 35% off, which a group with several sites reaches without trying. The structure is on the wholesale pricing page.
Aprons and outer layers do not carry a published starting figure because the specification varies too much to list one honestly. They are quoted against the job, so ask for them on the same quote as the shirts rather than treating them as an afterthought, since they usually account for more of the budget than an operator expects.
How does front of house differ from the kitchen on cost?
Front of house is a presentation cost and back of house is a consumables cost. A host stand polo is seen by every guest and is replaced when it looks tired. A kitchen tee is destroyed by heat, oil and hot washes, and is replaced on a schedule whether it looks tired or not. Budget the two differently even if you buy them together.
That also changes the decoration choice. Embroidery survives a punishing wash cycle better than most print; a large printed back panel on a kitchen tee will show its age first. The options are compared in which printing method should you choose.
Which decoration choice moves the number most?
The number of print colours and the size of an embroidered mark. A single-colour logo on the chest is the most economical sensible specification and looks right in almost every venue. A full-colour back print on the same garment is a different job. Stitch count drives embroidery pricing, so a dense crest costs more than a simple wordmark at the same physical size.
Before you brief a designer, it is worth reading how many colours should your design have, because the decision is made at artwork stage and is expensive to revisit.
How many pieces per head should the budget assume?
Three per person is the working figure most venues land on for anything worn on shift: one on, one in the wash, one in reserve. Two is enough only if staff launder daily, which they do not. That multiplier is what turns a twenty-person restaurant into a sixty-piece order and clears the minimum without padding.
Add a small allowance for turnover on top, because hospitality staffing moves and a new starter with no shirt is a problem on their first Friday. Our restaurants and hospitality page sets out what venues usually order together.
Run the sum annually rather than per order, and the picture changes. A twenty-cover bistro putting sixty shirts through a year is buying a fixed, predictable cost that sits alongside laundry and linen. Seen that way, the difference between the bottom tier and one tier up is money the venue genuinely keeps, which is why consolidating a year of buying into one run beats topping up every quarter.
