Budgeting a Bulk Towel Order
By The Velocity Wear Team
Budget a towel order as six lines rather than one: the towels, the decoration, any labelling or bagging, the £150 sample, delivery, and a contingency for the size or colour you will want more of. Towels are quoted per job, so build the budget from a quote against your real quantity rather than from an assumed piece price.
What goes into the total, line by line?
Start with quantity, because everything else scales from it. The minimum is 50 pieces per design and the discount climbs to a ceiling of 35 per cent as the quantity rises through the bands, so the unit price is a function of the decision you make first. Multiply it out, then add decoration if it was quoted separately.
Then the extras: woven tabs, care labels, individual bagging, a second branding position. Then the sample at £150, credited against the bulk order. Then delivery, which on towels is a bigger number than on flat garments because of the volume. The tier structure is on the pricing page.
How much should you hold back for the sample?
The sample is £150 and it is credited against the bulk order, so in cashflow terms it is an early payment rather than an extra cost. Budget it as a separate item anyway, because it usually falls in a different month from the main invoice and it is the line finance queries most often.
If you are sampling two specifications to choose between, that is two sample fees. It is still cheap next to committing several hundred pieces to the wrong weight, and it is the only way to compare a gym weight and a spa weight with your hands rather than with adjectives. Request both alongside the quote so they arrive in the same week and can be judged together.
Where does the budget usually go wrong?
Delivery, and second colourways. Towels are bulky for their value, so freight is a real proportion of the total rather than a rounding error, and buyers who costed a garment order last year tend to under-estimate it badly. The second colourway catches people because a colour needing its own screens is a separate design carrying its own 50-piece minimum.
The third trap is ordering exactly what you need. Towels get lost, stained and taken home, so a run with no margin is a run you repeat at an awkward moment in a new dye lot. Build a small buffer in from the start. The full cost picture for towel programmes is set out in what wholesale towels actually cost.
Timing is a budget question as much as a cost question. The sample is normally paid well before the main invoice, and the balance tends to fall due around production rather than around delivery, so a budget assuming one payment in the month the towels arrive will be wrong in both directions. Ask for the payment stages in writing alongside the quote and put them in the right months from the start.
Does ordering more actually save money?
Per piece, yes, and the saving can be substantial because the fixed setup costs spread across a larger run. In total cash it obviously costs more, and there is a point where the extra towels are storage rather than value. Work out the cost per towel actually used, not the cost per towel bought.
For a gym with constant rotation, deeper is usually right. For a one-off event, it rarely is. If the towels are being sold rather than used internally, the margin calculation is a different exercise and is covered in pricing towels for resale. Either way, the towel options themselves are listed on the wholesale towels page.
Set the quantity against a period you can actually see. Twelve months is a sensible horizon for most sites, because beyond that the branding may well change, and a cupboard of towels carrying an old logo is a write-off rather than a saving.
