Restocking Branded Kit for Salons
By The Velocity Wear Team
Reorder salon kit before the stockroom empties, not after. A repeat run is another 50 pieces per design and takes the same 10-15 working days to build, so the moment to place it is when your spares drop to about a month of cover. Quote the original order reference and keep the same colour reference on file, and run two will sit alongside run one.
When should a salon place a repeat order?
Work from how fast you issue pieces, not from how full the shelf looks. If you hand out two tunics a month, a stock of six is three months of cover, and a build plus delivery eats six weeks of that. Placing the reorder with a month of buffer still in hand is the version that never leaves anyone in their own clothes on a Saturday.
Towels run down faster than uniform in almost every salon, because they leave the cycle through staining and loss rather than through people leaving. Track them separately. They are quoted per job rather than sold at a published from-price, so a towel reorder needs a fresh quote conversation where a tunic reorder often does not. The salons and barbers page covers what tends to be bought together.
Will the second run match the first?
Close, if you give the factory what it needs. Dyed fabric is produced in batches, and two batches of the same nominal colour can differ slightly. The way to control that is to reference the original order rather than re-describing the colour from memory, and to say explicitly that the new pieces will be worn next to the old ones. A supplier told that will match to the earlier run rather than to a generic swatch.
Where an exact match matters most is a mixed floor, with half the team in run one and half in run two. If the difference would bother you, order enough in the first run to avoid mixing at all, or plan to retire the old pieces as the new ones arrive. The mechanics of repeating a design are set out in can I reorder the same design later.
How much buffer is worth holding?
Enough to cover one full production cycle plus the time it takes you to notice. That is six weeks of issuing, rounded up. For a three-chair salon that might be four or five pieces; for a multi-site group it is a different arithmetic entirely, and the volume discount of up to 35% as quantity rises usually makes the larger single run the better purchase anyway.
Do not confuse buffer with dead stock. Buffer sits in the sizes you reissue; dead stock is the extra-small nobody has ever asked for. A schedule beats a reaction here, and setting up a reorder schedule walks through building one that survives a busy quarter.
Seasonal swings belong in the calculation as well. A salon that fills its diary before Christmas and again ahead of summer burns through spare stock faster in those months than in February, so a buffer sized on a quiet week runs dry during a busy one. Set the trigger against your heaviest period rather than your average, and check it against last year's rota instead of last month's.
What should a salon keep on file between runs?
Four things, and they take five minutes to save. The original order reference, the artwork file exactly as approved, the colour reference used on the first build, and the size split you ordered against the split you actually issued. That last pair is the most useful document in the folder, because the gap between them tells you what to change next time.
Store them somewhere that outlives the manager who placed the order. Salons turn over staff, and a reorder that starts with rebuilding the artwork from a photo of a tunic is a reorder that will not match. Everything available to add to a repeat run is listed across the wholesale range, including pieces you skipped first time round.
