Sizing a Clothing Order for Schools
By The Velocity Wear Team
Sizes are mixed freely inside the 50-piece minimum, so a school can order exactly the spread it needs at no extra cost. The difficulty is not the supplier, it is the data: a year group that guesses its sizes produces a different order from one that measures. Collect actual sizes, then add a small buffer in the middle of the range.
How should a school split sizes across 50 pieces?
Where you have real sign-up data, order it exactly and stop guessing. Where you are ordering ahead of sign-ups, the shape of a secondary year group is heavily weighted to the middle, so a split that puts the bulk into medium and large and keeps the extremes thin is the safer default. Adult sizing on leavers kit also runs large in practice because pupils want the oversized look.
Order the buffer pieces in the sizes people actually swap into, which is up rather than down. A spare XL sells; a spare XS sits in a cupboard until August.
Why does collecting sizes by form group work better?
Because a form tutor can chase twenty-eight pupils and a business manager cannot chase two hundred. Give each tutor a single sheet, a deadline and a size chart with chest measurements on it rather than letters alone, and the return rate climbs sharply. Aggregate afterwards.
Put a physical garment in front of them if you can. The £150 sample is credited against the bulk order, and a hoodie passed around a form room settles more arguments about fit than any chart. The reasoning is set out in apparel sizing and fit.
Collect the data in one format, too. A sheet where half the pupils have written a letter, a quarter have written a chest measurement and the rest have written their usual high street size takes a member of staff a full afternoon to reconcile. Give them one column and one set of options and the aggregation is a five-minute job.
What do you do about the pupils who never reply?
Assume they will want one, assume they will want a medium or a large, and fold them into the buffer. A non-response is not a no; it is a pupil who will appear in the last week of term asking whether there are any left. Ordering ten extra at the point of the run is far cheaper than a second run of fifty later.
Publish a hard cut-off and then honour it, because a list that keeps moving pushes out the artwork approval and with it the 10 to 15 working day build.
How do you avoid a box of unsold XS at the end of term?
Three habits. Never order the extremes to the same depth as the middle. Never split the buffer evenly across every size. And keep the design usable outside the specific cohort, so leftover pieces can be sold at an open evening rather than written off with a year number printed on the sleeve.
Grading also varies between garment types, so a large hoodie and a large polo are not the same measurement. See how garment sizing is graded, and the schools and leavers page for the size runs we hold across the wholesale range.
Keep a record of what was ordered against what was actually collected, and hand it to whoever runs the order next year. Two cycles of that data are worth more than any amount of guesswork, because the shape of a school cohort is remarkably stable from one year group to the next even when the individuals change entirely.
