Briefing a Supplier for Towels
By The Velocity Wear Team
Send five things and the first quote will be the real one: finished dimensions in centimetres, the weight band, the quantity, the branding method with vector artwork, and the date you need stock in hand. Towels are quoted per job, so a quote built on guesses gets revised once the real specification appears, usually upwards and usually late.
What makes a first quote accurate?
Specificity about the towel itself. Size, weight band, border type and colour reference between them describe a physical object; anything less describes a category. A supplier quoting a category will quote against a reasonable assumption, and every assumption is a place where the number can move later.
Quantity is the other half. Price moves with volume, the minimum is 50 pieces per design and the discount reaches up to 35 per cent as quantity rises, so a quote for 50 and a quote for 500 are genuinely different conversations. If you are undecided, ask for both and choose from the comparison. The wholesale towels page sets out what can be specified.
Which artwork files should you send?
Vector, in the original file rather than a screenshot of it, with fonts outlined and the Pantone references noted. Send the full logo plus any simplified version you already have, and say which elements are essential and which can be dropped if the towel border will not take them.
Flag anything auto-generated before it goes anywhere near production, because upscaled or machine-drawn artwork tends to fall apart at the edges once it has to be separated or digitised. How to spot the problem early is covered in spotting low-effort AI artwork before it reaches your garments.
Say what the artwork has to do as well as what it is. A logo that must be legible from across a gym floor is a different brief from one that sits quietly in a hem, and the same file gets handled differently depending on which you want. Name the elements that are non-negotiable, the ones that can be dropped, and any minimum size the wordmark has to hold. The first proof then comes back close rather than as a starting point for three rounds of revision.
How do you describe the towel you want?
In use, not in adjectives. Saying a towel is for a gym floor where it will be washed daily at high temperature tells a supplier more than saying you want a premium towel. The weight bands run from a lighter gym towel through a middleweight spa towel to a heavier hotel towel, and the job decides which is right.
Ask for the GSM figure to be written into the quote. It is a real specification even though no figure is published here, and having it on paper is what makes the delivery checkable. Add the laundry regime, because a contract laundry pushes the answer towards woven branding rather than print.
What do buyers usually leave out?
Four things, in roughly this order: the deadline, the packing requirement, the delivery address constraints and the budget. A deadline changes whether sampling fits. Packing changes the unit cost. A site with no forklift changes the delivery method. And a budget lets a supplier steer you to a specification that lands inside it rather than one that does not.
None of that is commercially risky to share. It shortens the process and removes the revision cycle where a quote turns out to be for a different towel from the one in your head. The tiers you are quoting against are on the pricing page, and how to read the resulting document line by line is in reading a wholesale quote for towels.
Send it all in one message rather than across a week of fragments. A brief that arrives in pieces gets quoted against whichever pieces had landed at the time, and the revisions that follow are not anybody being difficult; they are the quote catching up with information that was never in front of it.
