Reading a Wholesale Quote for Towels
By The Velocity Wear Team
A towel quote normally carries a unit price at a stated quantity, the decoration cost, the sample fee and delivery, with any bagging or labelling itemised separately. Towels are quoted per job rather than from a published price, so the unit figure means nothing until you know the size, the weight and the quantity it was calculated against.
What is inside the per-piece figure?
The towel itself: the cloth at a given weight, the finished size, the border, the dyeing and the making up. Sometimes basic branding is folded in and sometimes it is separate, which is the single biggest reason two quotes appear to disagree when they are actually describing the same job differently.
Read the quantity the price is attached to before anything else. The minimum is 50 pieces per design and the discount rises to a ceiling of 35 per cent as quantity moves up through the tiers, so a headline figure at 1,000 pieces and one at 50 are not comparable. The bands are published on the pricing page.
Which costs sit outside the unit price?
The £150 sample, which is credited back against the bulk order. Delivery, which on towels is significant because they are bulky. Individual bagging, if you want it. Woven labels and care labels. A second branding position. Any colour that needs its own screens, which counts as a separate design with its own 50-piece minimum.
Ask for each of those as a line rather than a total. A quote that reads as one number is impossible to negotiate and impossible to compare, whereas an itemised one shows you exactly where a specification change would save money. The wholesale towels page describes which of those options exist.
How should the quantity tiers be shown?
As a small table rather than a single row. Seeing the unit price at 50, at 250 and at 500 in one view is what tells you whether stepping up a band pays for itself, and it frequently does, because the towel price falls while the fixed costs of setting up the decoration stay where they are.
That said, the lowest unit price does not always make the best order. Towels take storage, and stock you will not move within a year is capital sitting in a cupboard. What towel pricing looks like in practice is set out in what wholesale towels actually cost.
Check which quantity the tiers are measured per, as well. Volume is counted per design, so 300 towels split across three designs is three runs of 100 rather than one run of 300, and it prices accordingly. Anyone planning a range of three colourways and expecting the 300-piece rate is working from a number that was never available to them. Ask for the tiers to be shown per design so the assumption is visible on the page.
Which questions close the gaps?
Four of them. What GSM is this quoted at, in numbers? What are the finished dimensions and the tolerance? Is the decoration included in the unit price or separate? And how many cartons will this be, and will it arrive palletised? Those four remove almost every argument that happens later.
Add a fifth if the order is going to repeat: how long is the quote held, and what happens on a reorder in a new dye lot. Get the answers on the same document as the prices. Turning the quote into a full project cost, including delivery and the sample, is worked through in budgeting a bulk towel order.
Then read the quote against your own brief, line by line, before replying. Most discrepancies are not errors; they are a supplier quoting something sensible in place of a detail you never specified. Finding those now costs one email. Finding them when the pallet arrives costs a production run.
