Picking a Clothing Supplier: Schools
By The Velocity Wear Team
A school should pick on four answers: what the minimum is per design, when the production clock starts, whether decoration is inside the quoted price, and what a sample costs. For us those are 50 pieces, artwork approval, yes, and £150 credited against the bulk order. Anything vaguer than that is hard to hold a supplier to later.
What separates a supplier that suits schools from one that does not?
Schools buy against fixed dates and then sell on to parents, which is a harder brief than most commercial orders. The supplier needs to be comfortable with a personalised name list, with a size range that spans children and adults in one run, and with a delivery date that genuinely cannot move because the last day of term is the last day of term.
Ask directly how they handle a run where every garment carries a different name. A supplier who treats that as routine has done it; one who hesitates is about to learn on your order.
Ask too how they want the artwork supplied. A supplier who asks for a vector file and a colour reference is working the way a manufacturer works. One who says any image is fine is either very confident or has not looked at what a school crest does when it is scaled to eight centimetres and stitched.
Which questions expose a quote that will grow later?
Ask what is not included. Then ask what the same quote looks like at the quantity you will actually order rather than the one on the page. Then ask what happens if you add a second colour, because that is a second design and a second minimum almost everywhere, and a quote that ignores it will be revised upwards after you have committed.
Compare on landed cost per piece with decoration, labelling and delivery included. Our tiers run from 50 to 99 up to 1,000 plus, reaching up to 35% off the 50-piece price, and the wholesale pricing is published so you can hold a rival quote against a structure rather than a feeling.
How much should a school read into a sample?
A great deal, provided it is a real garment rather than a render. Fabric weight, crest placement and colour under school lighting are all things a sample settles in an afternoon and a PDF never settles at all. The fee is £150 and it comes off the bulk invoice, so the cost is time.
What a sample cannot tell you is how the supplier behaves under pressure. For that, watch how quickly they answered your questions before any money changed hands. More on the questioning in questions worth asking a manufacturer.
Who owns the artwork once the run is done?
Your crest is yours, and you should be able to take the approved production file elsewhere. Ask the question before the first order rather than after a bad one, because a school that cannot retrieve its own file is tied to whoever holds it. Keep a copy in a school drive, not in a departing teacher's inbox.
The same applies to the garment and colour references that make a reorder repeatable. Our schools and leavers page sets out how we hold those between runs, and the reorder side is covered in setting up a reorder schedule.
Finally, judge the supplier on how they answer an awkward question rather than an easy one. Anyone can quote a price. Ask what happens if the delivery misses the last day of term, or what they would do if a print sat crooked on forty pieces, and listen for whether the answer contains a process or only reassurance. The first is a supplier; the second is a sales call.
