Minimum Orders Explained for Schools
By The Velocity Wear Team
The minimum is 50 pieces per design. Sizes inside those 50 are mixed however the school needs, so one leavers hoodie design spanning child sizes to adult XL qualifies on its own. What does not share a minimum is a second design, and a colourway that needs its own screens counts as a second design.
How does the 50-piece minimum apply to a year group?
Count designs, not pupils. A year of 120 taking one hoodie with one printed back is a single run of 120 and clears the minimum comfortably. A year of 40 taking that same hoodie does not, and the usual fix is to open the order to staff, siblings or the year below rather than to shrink the design.
Because the count is per design, a school with two small cohorts can often merge them. One artwork, one run, two groups receiving it. The alternative, two runs of 40, does not work at all.
Do two colours count as one order or two?
Two colourways of the same garment are two designs when they need their own screens, so each needs 50. This catches schools out more than anything else, because offering pupils a choice of navy or burgundy feels like one decision and is actually two orders of fifty.
There is a way around it. Keep one garment colour and vary something that does not need new screens, or accept that the choice costs you the lower tier on both runs. The general rule across products is set out in minimum order quantities explained.
What happens if the sign-up list stops at 40?
You order 50 and hold the extra ten, which is usually the right answer for a school. Pupils who missed the deadline turn up in the last fortnight of term without fail, and ten spare in the office costs less than a second run of fifty later. Size them to the middle of your range rather than the extremes.
The wrong answer is dropping the personalised element to make the numbers work, because a leavers hoodie without the name list is the thing nobody wanted. Keep the design and find the ten pieces.
The other route is to open the order beyond the obvious group. Teaching staff will usually buy one, sixth formers will buy for siblings, and a PTA will often take a handful to sell at the summer fair. Ten extra buyers found in a week is a far better outcome than a design nobody gets because the list stalled six short.
Can names on the back change the count?
No. A name list is decoration applied to one design, so 120 hoodies carrying 120 different names is still one design and one run. That is what makes leavers kit workable at all: the minimum is counted on the artwork, and the personalisation sits on top of it.
The same holds for numbers, nicknames or a house colour printed on a sleeve, as long as the underlying garment and artwork are common to every piece. What tips it into a second design is a change that needs different setup, which in practice means a different garment, a different colourway or a genuinely different layout rather than a change of text inside the same layout.
What you cannot do is treat each personalised hoodie as its own tiny order. See the schools and leavers page for how we handle name lists, and the wholesale range for the products that minimum applies across.
One practical consequence: because the count is on the design, it pays to decide the design before you canvass the year group. A school that asks pupils to choose between three garments has created three potential minimums and will almost certainly end up buying one of them anyway, having spent a fortnight on a vote. Pick the garment, then offer the choice on size and on whether they want a name.
