Pricing Towels for Resale
By The Velocity Wear Team
Work from landed cost, not the quoted unit price. Landed cost is the towel plus decoration, labelling, bagging, the delivery apportioned across the run and the sample spread over the pieces. Set the retail price against that figure and against what comparable towels sell for in your market, then check the margin still stands after payment fees and returns.
How do you work out a retail price from a quote?
Take the invoice total for the whole run, including every line, and divide by the number of sellable pieces. That number is your true cost per towel, and it is normally meaningfully higher than the unit price on the quote. Everything after that is a decision about positioning rather than about arithmetic.
Then look at the market rather than at a multiplier. A branded towel in a gym reception sits in a different price context from the same towel on a wellness brand website, and the towel does not change. Towels are quoted per job, so get the landed figure first from the wholesale towels page enquiry, and the quantity bands from the pricing page.
Which costs do people forget to load in?
Payment processing, outbound postage if you are shipping to customers, packaging, the proportion of the run that gets used for photography and giveaways, and returns. Towels are bulky, so posting one costs meaningfully more than posting a t-shirt, and a free-delivery threshold set without checking that will quietly remove the margin.
Storage counts too, even when it is a corner of your own unit. Stock sitting still for a year has cost you the space and the cash it tied up. Building the wider commercial picture before a first run is covered in pre-order or buy stock first.
Photography is worth costing in properly rather than absorbing. A towel is a difficult thing to shoot well, because folded terry reads as a grey rectangle unless it is lit and styled, and a weak image on a product page suppresses conversion far more than a few pounds on the unit price ever would. Budget the shoot, the props and the pieces you will cut up for detail shots as part of the run.
Does buying deeper change the retail price?
It changes the margin, not usually the price. Retail price is set by what the market will pay; buying deeper lowers your cost against that same price, which is where the discount actually shows up. The minimum is 50 pieces per design and the discount reaches up to 35 per cent as quantity rises.
The risk is the mirror of the reward. Deeper buying only pays if the stock sells, and an unsold towel earns nothing no matter how well it was bought. For a first product, order to the quantity you can honestly sell in a season and take the smaller margin as the price of finding out.
Watch the size mix as well. A range of three sizes looks generous on a website and triples the stock you carry against the same demand, and each size is its own run against the 50-piece minimum. Launch with one, learn what sells, then widen the range from evidence rather than from optimism.
What if the towel is a gift rather than a product?
Then the calculation is cost per impression rather than margin. A towel given to a member or a client is bought against retention and recall, and it competes with the other things that budget could have been spent on. Its advantage is longevity: a towel stays in use for years where a printed item is in a bin by Friday.
Present it accordingly. Bagged, labelled and finished as a product, a gifted towel carries the perceived value of one, which is exactly the effect you are buying. Take the £150 sample before committing, since the fee is credited against the bulk order. Order a sample at quote stage, and how brands build towel ranges for retail is described in private label towels for wellness brands.
