T-Shirts for Agencies: size splits
By The Velocity Wear Team
An agency rarely knows who will wear the tees, so the split has to be built for an unknown crowd. Weight it heavily towards M, L and XL, keep the extremes small, and carry a few extra of the middle sizes rather than a full range of the ends. Our 50-piece minimum mixes sizes freely, so a lopsided curve costs nothing.
How do you size for people you have not met?
Split the audience into two groups first: named wearers and unnamed wearers. Crew, staff and client-side attendees can be asked directly, and that list should be collected the same week the brief lands. Everyone else — giveaway recipients, public activation wearers, press — gets covered by a weighted curve rather than a guess per person.
For the unnamed portion, three sizes do most of the work. M, L and XL between them cover the large majority of adults comfortably enough for a campaign garment. S and XXL are worth stocking, but in small numbers, because an oversized tee on a smaller wearer is a wearable outcome while the reverse is not.
What split works for a 50-piece campaign run?
A defensible opening shape for a mixed adult audience, which you can adjust once the named list is in.
- S — 5 pieces
- M — 13 pieces
- L — 16 pieces
- XL — 12 pieces
- XXL — 4 pieces
If the campaign leans towards a streetwear or youth audience, shift weight into M and L and consider a boxy fit, which reads as intentional rather than baggy. On a regular fit in 150–180 GSM the sizing runs close to the label; on a 220–240 GSM boxy blank the body is wider and shorter, so the same customer often takes a smaller size. Blanks and fits are listed on our wholesale t-shirts page.
How do you avoid a box of leftovers after the campaign?
Order to the curve, not to the round number. Agencies often round 50 up to a comfortable 60 by adding five at each end of the range, and those ten pieces are exactly the ones still sitting in a cupboard six months later. If you want headroom, add it in the middle sizes, which get used by the next activation.
Plan a destination for the surplus before it exists. Internal team stock, a client office, a second activation — all of them are better than storage. And keep a record of what was left, because it is the only honest data you will have for the next run, as the reordering guide sets out.
Should each client get its own size curve?
If the audiences genuinely differ, yes. A trade conference audience is shaped differently from a festival crowd, and applying the same curve to both is how agencies end up with the wrong tail sizes on both jobs. Keep a short note per client, and let it build up over campaigns.
Remember that each design carries its own 50-piece minimum, so two clients cannot share a run unless the artwork is identical. Where an agency handles ongoing staff and client kit rather than one-off activations, the corporate page covers how repeat sizing is managed across intakes.
One habit that pays off across accounts: keep a single sizing sheet per client, updated after every job, listing what was ordered and what came back. After three campaigns it stops being a guess and becomes a curve you can defend in a budget meeting. It is the least expensive piece of account knowledge an agency can build, and it is the one that most often gets lost when the person who ran the last job moves on.
