Ordering Towels for Freshers
By The Velocity Wear Team
Freshers towels need ordering in July for a September arrival. Production takes 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval and transit follows, but the real constraint is August: universities, unions and suppliers all run thin, approvals take longer and a week disappears without anyone noticing. Starting in July gives that month somewhere to go.
Why does a freshers towel order start in July?
Because the date does not move. Freshers week happens when term starts, and stock that arrives in week two has missed the entire purpose. Counting back from a mid-September in-hand date, you want production running in August, which means artwork approved by late July, which means the design agreed and the quote signed earlier than that. Union committees hand over in the summer as well, so the person who approves the artwork in July may not be the person who commissioned it in June.
Who is the towel for — student, society or staff?
These are three different products. A towel in a welcome pack is a giveaway: light, cheap to ship in volume, branded simply. A society towel is merchandise that students choose to buy, so it can be heavier and carry a design they actually want. A staff towel for a sports centre or gym is working stock that goes through a commercial laundry every day and needs to be specified for that life instead. Trying to serve all three with one order is how you end up with towels nobody uses. Each is its own design and therefore its own 50-piece minimum.
How many designs can a budget carry?
Fewer than most committees want. Every design needs 50 pieces, and every colourway that needs its own screens counts separately, so a plan with six society variants is six minimums before anyone has discussed quantity. The better approach is one strong base design across a larger run, taking the volume step up through the tiers — up to 35% off the 50-piece rate at the highest — and differentiating with packaging rather than with separate print runs. Options for that are in labels and packaging for bulk towels.
What goes wrong in August?
Approval. The proof goes out, the committee is scattered, and the file sits unopened for ten days that were not in anyone's plan. Nominate one person with authority to sign off before the proof exists and hold them to it. Everything else — production, freight, packing — is predictable. Start the spec through the towels range, pick the supplier properly using choosing a wholesale towel supplier, and if the design is new, the £150 credited sample is worth taking in June so July is spent ordering rather than deciding.
Delivery address is the other August problem. Campus post rooms run reduced hours over the summer and a pallet arriving at a building nobody is staffing does not get signed for. Confirm where the consignment is going, who will be there, and whether the receiving point can physically take a pallet rather than a stack of parcels. Get that agreed at the same time as the quantity.
Finally, think about what the towel is meant to achieve. A giveaway that ends up in a drawer has cost money and done nothing; one that gets taken to the sports centre twice a week works for you all year. That difference comes down to whether the design is something a student would choose to be seen with, which is a question worth asking a few of them before the artwork is signed off rather than after.
Handing over is the last thing to plan for. Whoever runs this in July will have moved on by the time the reorder question comes round, so write down the job number, the quantity, the supplier contact and what you would change next time, and leave it somewhere the next committee will find it. That single document saves the following year's team from starting the whole process from a blank page in June.
