Handing Out Towels to a Team
By The Velocity Wear Team
Collect who needs what before the towels arrive, not after. Towels have no size labels to sort by, so the variables are colour and specification rather than fit, which makes distribution simpler than a clothing handout but easier to get lazy about. Bag by name where the towels are personal, hold back a spare allowance, and record who received what.
How do you collect what each person needs?
A single form, open for a fixed week, with a default for anyone who does not answer. Ask for colour choice if there is one, and whether the towel is for personal use or for a shared station, because the second group usually needs a different count from the first. Close the form before you place the order, not before you receive it.
Remember the order minimum is 50 pieces per design, and the form response will not respect that. If forty people want one colour and eight want another, the second colour is a separate design with its own 50-piece minimum unless the artwork and screens are identical. The wholesale towels page explains where a colourway becomes a separate run.
Ask the question in a way people can answer, too. Most staff have no view on towel weight and a very strong view on whether they get one at all, so a form asking them to choose a specification produces noise. Decide the specification yourself, then ask only what genuinely varies: how many, which colour, and which site they will collect from.
Is name bagging worth the extra step?
For a team handout, usually yes. A bagged towel with a name on it gets collected in one pass, and nobody opens six of them looking for theirs. For a locker room stack or a laundry rotation it is wasted, because the first thing that happens is the bag goes in the bin.
Individual bagging can be done at production for a per-piece cost, or by you with a marker pen and an afternoon. Price both. Across a large team the production option usually wins on time even when it loses on money, and how the goods arrive either way is described in how bulk towels are packed.
How many spares should you keep back?
Enough to cover new starters until the next order and to replace the ones that vanish, which they will. Towels leave buildings. Holding a reserve is cheaper than a second run in a new dye lot that will not quite match the first, and it removes the pressure to reorder at an awkward moment.
Base the reserve on turnover rather than on a fixed percentage. Somewhere with constant staff churn needs a deeper buffer than a settled team of twelve. The tiered pricing means the spares cost less per piece than the original allocation did, and the bands are set out on the pricing page.
What is the fastest way to hand them out?
One table, one list, one person ticking names. Lay the stacks out by colour or specification before anyone arrives, work alphabetically, and record collection as it happens. The whole thing takes twenty minutes if it is prepared and half a day if it is not.
Keep the record, because it is what tells you what to order next time and stops the same person collecting twice. If you are also running a clothing handout, the same preparation applies with the added complication of fit, which is covered in how to split sizes on a first order.
Say something when you hand them over. A towel left on a desk without explanation is stock; the same towel passed across with a line about why it was bought is a gift, and the difference costs nothing. It also tends to reduce the number that end up forgotten at the bottom of a locker by the end of the month.
