Ordering T-Shirts for Tour Season
By The Velocity Wear Team
Tour shirts have to be printed, delivered and counted before the first date, which means ordering six to eight weeks out. The build is 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, and that is the easy part. What eats the calendar is artwork sign-off across a band, a manager and a label, so get the design approved before you think about the print.
How far ahead does tour merch need ordering?
Count backwards from the load-in of the first date, not the date itself, and add a week so the boxes can be opened and counted somewhere that is not a van. Subtract transit, subtract 15 working days of production, subtract the approval round. That puts the order six weeks out at the tightest and eight comfortably.
The other reason to be early is routing. Merch often needs to go to a rehearsal space, a lock-up or a tour manager's address rather than a normal office, and those addresses take deliveries at awkward hours. Give yourself the slack to redirect a pallet once.
How many shirts per date?
There is no universal ratio, and anyone who quotes you one is guessing about your audience. What you can control is the structure of the order. The minimum is 50 pieces per design, sizes mixed freely, and every additional design or colourway with its own screens is another 50. A twelve-date run selling one design is therefore a very different commitment from one selling four.
The pattern that works for most first tours: one hero design in enough depth that it cannot sell out, ordered as a single large run to reach a better price tier. Pricing steps at 50 to 99, 100 to 249, 250 to 499, 500 to 999 and 1,000 plus, with up to 35% off the 50-piece rate at the top, so depth on one design beats spread across four. Tees start at $13 a piece at the minimum on the wholesale t-shirts page. Shirts that do not sell on tour sell online afterwards, provided the design does not list the dates.
Should the sizes be split evenly?
No, and an even split is the most common merch mistake. A flat allocation across five or six sizes leaves you with a table full of extra small and triple extra large on the fourth night while the middle sizes have gone. Weight the curve heavily to medium and large, hold a modest number at each extreme, and remember that the shirt gets bought by whoever is at the front rather than by a representative sample.
Two operational details matter more than they sound. Ask for the cartons to be packed by size rather than mixed, so the person working the table can restock in the dark. And ask for individual bagging if the shirts are going to be handled in a van for a month, because folded stock without bags comes back creased and marked. Both are packing decisions, covered in how bulk t-shirts are packed.
What should you decide before sending the artwork?
Three things. Whether the design lists the dates, which makes it unsellable after the tour ends. Whether you are printing front, back or both, since a back graphic changes the price per piece. And what the garment colour is, because a black body with a white print behaves differently from a white body with a black print at the ink level. Get those settled, then send the files. The full approach to a merch design that survives the tour is set out in band merch for UK tours.
If you have never run a print job before, the £150 sample is worth taking. It is credited against the bulk order, and it lets you hold the shirt you are about to buy five hundred of. See the samples page for how the credit works.
