T-Shirts for Restaurants: samples
By The Velocity Wear Team
A restaurant t-shirt sample costs £150, and that £150 is credited against your bulk order when you place it. You get one finished garment in your fabric weight, your colour and your artwork. You can wash it, wear it through a full service and decide whether the fit works for both front and back of house before 50 pieces exist.
What does the £150 sample actually give you?
It gives you the garment you would receive in bulk, not a swatch and a mockup. Fabric weight, stitching, neck tape, collar rib, print position, the exact ink or thread colour: all of it is the production spec. Our wholesale t-shirts page lists the weights we cut from, and the sample is your chance to hold one before the run. Samples are never free, but the fee comes off the invoice, so for a venue that is going to order it is a timing cost rather than a real one.
What should you put a restaurant sample through?
Kitchens are hot and everything stains. The sample is worth abusing. Put it on a member of floor staff for a busy evening, then wash it the way your team actually washes things, which is hot and often. Look at the hem after three cycles, look at the print edge, look at whether the colour has shifted.
- Wash it five times at the temperature your staff really use, not the care label ideal.
- Check the print or embroidery after those washes, especially any thin lettering.
- Wear it near a pass or a grill for a service and see how the weight behaves in heat.
- Test one stain you get constantly - oil, tomato, red wine - and see what lifts.
Weight is the decision most venues get wrong. A 150 GSM combed ring-spun cotton is light enough for a hot kitchen and dries fast, but it shows sweat and wears through at the shoulder faster. A 240 GSM sits better on a floor team and hides marks, and it is the one to test if your staff are front of house in view of guests. The restaurants and hospitality page covers which weight suits which role.
Does ordering a sample delay the main run?
Bulk production runs 10-15 working days from artwork approval, and the sample sits before that clock starts. Treat them as two stages. If your opening date or menu launch is fixed, work backwards: transit, then 10-15 working days, then sample turnaround and your own review time. Venues that skip the review week are the ones who end up approving a sample they never properly wore.
When is a sample worth skipping?
If you are repeating a shirt you have already run with us in the same fabric and colour, the sample adds little - the spec is on file, and the questions are about sizes and quantity instead. That is a reorder conversation, and we cover it in reordering restaurant t-shirts. Skip it too if your design is a single-colour chest logo on a stock colour and your team already wear that weight in another garment. Order one when the fit is new, the colour is critical, or the shirt is going in front of guests every night.
How does the sample change what you order in bulk?
Most venues change two things after the sample lands: the weight, and the size curve. Trying the real garment on three or four people tends to move a whole order up or down a size, particularly with boxy fits, which run wider than staff expect. Some venues also switch from a large back print to a small chest mark once they see how it looks under an apron. The 50-piece minimum is per design, so make those decisions before you commit, not after - and if you want a sense of how quantity moves the per-piece figure, bulk t-shirt pricing walks through it.
