Sizing a Clothing Order for Restaurants
By The Velocity Wear Team
Sizes are mixed freely inside the 50-piece minimum, so a restaurant can order the exact spread it needs. The difference from most buyers is turnover: a team list taken today will be partly wrong within a season. Weight the run towards the middle sizes and treat the spares as recruitment stock rather than as a mistake.
What size split fits a restaurant team?
Start from your current team, then flatten the curve. If you have one extra small and one extra large today, do not order three of each, because those are the pieces that will still be in the box next year. The middle of the range absorbs new starters; the edges do not.
Order the exact sizes for the people who are definitely staying, such as managers and long-serving chefs, and order to the shape of the range for everyone else.
A useful sanity check is to look at who you have hired over the past two years rather than who is on the rota this week. That list is a much better predictor of the sizes you will need to issue next year, and it tends to be flatter and more central than the current team suggests.
Should uniform be sized to the person or the role?
To the role, with the person as a starting point. A host stand shirt is worn by whoever is on the host stand, and that changes. Kitchen pieces should be sized slightly generously because they are worn over other layers and in heat, while front of house pieces are sized to fit properly because they are seen close up all evening.
That difference is real enough to change the split. A back of house run skewed one size up from the front of house run is normal rather than sloppy.
How do you plan for turnover in the size run?
Build the buffer into the original order rather than planning a top-up. A replacement run carries its own 50-piece minimum, so five spare shirts today cost far less than fifty in four months. Keep those spares in the two or three sizes that cover most adults and you will fit almost every new starter on their first shift.
Record what you actually issued as people join, because after one cycle that log tells you the real shape of your team far better than a headcount does. The mechanics of grading are set out in how garment sizing is graded.
What stops leftover sizes piling up in the office?
Three rules. Do not order the extremes deep. Do not print anything that ties the garment to a season or a promotion. And check the measurements rather than trusting the letter on the label, because a large in one garment type is not a large in another.
A £150 sample, credited against the bulk order, settles the fit question before fifty pieces exist. There is more on sizing decisions in apparel sizing and fit, and the garments venues order are on the restaurants and hospitality page alongside the wider wholesale range.
Keep the spares somewhere a duty manager can reach them without asking permission. Stock locked in an office that only opens on weekdays is not stock, it is a delay, and a new starter arriving on a Saturday evening will simply work the shift in their own clothes. A labelled box behind the pass does more for uniform standards than any policy document.
