Budgeting a Bulk t-shirt Order
By The Velocity Wear Team
Build the budget in five lines: garments, decoration, sample, packaging and freight. At the 50-piece minimum our t-shirts start at $13 each, so 50 shirts is the garment line and everything else stacks on top. Budget the £150 sample first, since it comes back to you as credit against the bulk order, then add freight last because it depends on where the boxes land.
What does the whole order actually add up to?
Start with quantity, because it sets everything else. Fifty is the floor for one design, and sizes inside that fifty cost the same however you split them. Multiply your quantity by the tier price rather than the from-price if you are ordering past 99 pieces, because the tiers step at 50–99, 100–249, 250–499, 500–999 and 1,000+. The pricing page shows the steps, and the wholesale t-shirts page shows what the garment itself includes.
Then add the decoration you have actually specified rather than the decoration you imagine. A chest logo and a back print are two positions, not one. A second colourway that needs its own screens is a separate setup. Private label extras — woven neck labels, tear-out labels, swing tags — are their own line and worth budgeting deliberately rather than discovering at approval.
Where does a t-shirt budget usually break?
Three places. Freight, because people budget the garments and forget the boxes; it is weight and destination driven, and the UK, USA and Europe are not the same number. Extra positions, because a design grows between the first sketch and artwork approval. And quantity creep, where a 50-piece plan turns into 68 after people put their names down, which is fine on price but changes the total you had signed off.
The fourth, quieter one is currency. We invoice in seven currencies, so agree which one you are paying in before you set the budget. Converting a dollar quote into pounds in a spreadsheet and then being invoiced in something else is how a budget ends up 4% out through nobody sensible doing anything wrong. If you are costing the order to sell on rather than to give away, pricing t-shirts for resale works the margin side.
Should the sample come out of the same budget?
Put it in, then note the credit. The sample is £150 and it is credited against the bulk order that follows, so on a completed job it nets to nothing. On an abandoned one it does not, which is the honest way to budget it: £150 spent to find out whether the shirt is right, recovered if you go ahead. It is a smaller number than a 500-piece run of the wrong garment weight.
How much does moving up a tier save?
Enough to be worth checking before you lock the quantity. The discount runs up to 35% against the 50-piece rate as volume rises, so the per-piece figure at the top tier is a long way from the from-price. If your order sits near a boundary — 95 pieces, or 240 — price both sides of it. Buying a few more shirts sometimes costs less in total than buying fewer, and the spare stock covers the reorder you were going to place anyway. Ask for the comparison on the quote itself; reading a wholesale quote covers what else should be on it.
How long does a budget stay accurate?
Not indefinitely, so put a date on it and keep the quote attached. Blank costs and freight both move, and a budget assembled from figures four months old is a different budget by the time someone signs it off. If there is a gap between costing the order and placing it, ask for the price to be confirmed rather than assuming it still holds. That one email is what stops a re-quote landing after the money has been committed somewhere else, which is the version of this problem that is genuinely difficult to fix.
