Building a Size Curve for a Bulk Order
By The Velocity Wear Team
A size curve is simply how your order divides across sizes. There is no per-size minimum here, so the 50 pieces in a run can be arranged however your wearers actually need. The goal is not a neat pyramid. It is ending the season with nothing left in a size nobody asked for, which means starting from real data rather than from a template you found online.
What is a size curve in practical terms?
It is a list: how many smalls, how many mediums, how many larges, and so on down the run. For a known group — a staff team, a club, a school year — it should be a headcount rather than a curve at all, because you can simply ask. For an unknown audience, such as merchandise going on sale, it is an estimate, and the estimate should lean towards the middle sizes with a longer tail upward than downward. The total still has to reach 50 per design, and how that works is spelled out in what a minimum order actually means.
How do you split an order across sizes?
Start with whatever you know. A staff order is a rota with sizes against names, and that beats any model. A club has last year's kit list. A brand selling online has order history from previous products, which is the most valuable data you own and the most commonly ignored. Where you have nothing at all, weight the middle of the range heavily and keep the extremes small, then treat the first run as the survey it actually is and use its sell-through to set the second one.
Two adjustments worth making. If the garment is cut generously, the curve shifts down a size; if it runs close to the body, it shifts up. And if the same design is going to two audiences — staff and public, say — build two curves and add them rather than averaging them, because averaging produces a shape that fits neither.
Where does dead stock actually come from?
Almost always from the ends. Buyers order a token quantity of the smallest size out of a sense of completeness, and a token quantity of the largest out of caution, and both sit unsold. If you have no evidence anyone wants a particular size, do not order it to be tidy. Conversely, running short in the middle sizes is the expensive failure, because it means turning away demand you already had, and topping up means a fresh run of 50.
The second source is fit drift between suppliers. A large from one maker is not a large from another, so a curve that worked last year against a different garment may be wrong this year against the same size labels. Sample the new garment and check it against a person before you reuse an old split.
Should you collect sizes before ordering?
For any order going to a known group, yes, and do it with a size chart in front of people rather than asking them to name a size from memory. Publish the measurements, ask for the number, and set a deadline — the alternative is chasing six stragglers while the production window shrinks. Once the list is in, the order is arithmetic rather than judgement, and the quantity you land on drives the per-piece price, which falls as volume rises to a ceiling of 35% off the 50-piece figure. The tiers are on the pricing page and the range they apply to is on the wholesale page.
Keep the list. A sizing record is the most useful document a recurring order has, and it turns next year's planning into an update rather than a fresh survey. Programmes that run this properly are described in running a staff kit programme.
