Handing Out T-Shirts to a Team
By The Velocity Wear Team
Collect sizes with a deadline and a default, ask for the order to be bagged and labelled by name, and keep roughly one shirt in ten spare in the middle sizes. Handover is then a table and a list rather than a fortnight of chasing. The size collection is the slow part, so start it before artwork approval rather than after, and it will not touch the 10–15 working day production window at all.
How do you collect sizes without chasing people for weeks?
Give a form, a closing date and a stated default. A single sheet with name, size and a tick box beats a message thread every time, because you can see the gaps at a glance. Say in advance what happens to non-responders — they get the default size — and most of the stragglers reply that day. Chasing individuals one by one is what turns a two-day job into a two-week one.
Put a size chart next to the form and state the fit. Regular and boxy fits measure differently across the chest, and a team told only small, medium or large will guess wrong in both directions. Our blanks run 150–240 GSM combed ring-spun cotton, and the heavier weights sit differently on the body, which is another reason to show measurements rather than letters.
Should the order arrive bagged by name?
For anything over about thirty people, yes. Individual poly bagging with a name on each bag is a per-piece handling charge, and it is the difference between a handover that takes an hour and one that takes an afternoon of someone holding shirts up and shouting sizes. It also survives the case where the shirts arrive while you are away and someone else has to put them out.
If the budget will not carry it, the middle path is bagging by size with a count on each bag, then sorting by name yourself. Slower, but it still beats an unsorted carton. Either way ask for the packing list to match the size sheet you sent, so a discrepancy shows up at delivery rather than at handover. The wholesale t-shirts page sets out the packing options that can go on the order.
What should you hold back as spare?
Keep a handful in the sizes most of your team wear, plus one or two at the large end. Shirts get claimed twice, spilled on in the first week, or handed to someone who joined after the size sheet closed. Because the minimum is 50 pieces per design, the alternative to a spare is a whole second run, so a few extra units bought now are the cheap option. The pricing page shows how the tiers move if adding those spares takes you across a boundary.
What actually happens on handover day?
Lay the bags out alphabetically, keep the list in front of you, and tick each one off as it goes. Put the spares in a separate box and do not open it until everyone on the list has been served, because opening it early guarantees you run out for someone who was actually on the sheet. Note who is still unclaimed at the end and deal with those individually. If you are running this for a year group rather than a staff team, size splits for school orders covers the version with a name list attached, and conference and event t-shirts covers handing out to people you have never met.
Write the whole thing down as you go: who asked for what size, who has collected, what is left in the box. One sheet does it, and it is worth more than it looks. It settles the inevitable disagreement about whether somebody was on the list, it tells you what to order next time without relying on memory, and if another person has to finish the handover while you are away it is the only thing that makes that possible. The order takes three weeks; the record takes five minutes.
