Ordering Tracksuits for Trade Show Season
By The Velocity Wear Team
Order trade show tracksuits five to six weeks before the doors open, so the sets are in the building a week early. Production takes 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval and transit follows it. Stand kit that lands the night before leaves you no way to fix a wrong size or chase a box that never arrived.
When does the kit need to be in the building?
A week before the stand goes up, rather than the day before. That week is what lets you check sizes against the people actually travelling, swap anything that does not fit, and pack the sets with the rest of the stand. Counting back through transit and a fifteen working day build puts the order five to six weeks out.
If the stand travels, the kit travels with it or ahead of it. Shipping kit separately to a venue is the most common route to a team working a hall in whatever they happened to wear on the train.
How many sets does a stand actually need?
Fifty sets per design is the minimum, and for a team of eight that is a supply covering several shows rather than an overcommitment. Count two sets per person per multi-day show, because a set worn through a ten-hour day on a hard floor is not going back on the following morning.
Order for the season instead of the show. Exhibition calendars repeat, the artwork stays the same, and the volume bands take up to 35% off as the quantity rises, so one order covering three shows lands in a better band than three separate runs of fifty.
Include everybody who ends up on the stand, not only the sales team. Technical staff, whoever runs the demonstrations and the people who travel to help with the build all appear in photographs, and a stand where three people match and two do not undoes the reason you ordered kit in the first place.
What makes stand kit read well across a hall?
Contrast and one strong mark. A hall is visually noisy and a small chest logo disappears at ten metres, so a back print or a large chest block is what lets somebody recognise your team from the aisle. Colour carries further than detail: a set in your brand colour is identifiable before anyone can read a word on it.
The matched co-ord does half the work unaided. Two garments in the same fabric and the same dye lot read as a uniform, while a printed tee over whatever trousers people own reads as a crowd. Print placement on tracksuits covers what sizes hold up at distance.
Comfort decides whether the kit stays on at all. A stand day is ten hours upright on concrete, and a set that runs too warm gets abandoned by the afternoon of day one. Midweight fleece in a heated hall is usually as far as you want to go, with the top coming off and the jogger staying put. Storage matters too, since sets kept flat and bagged between shows arrive uncreased, and a creased uniform reads worse than none.
What if two shows fall close together?
Order once and keep the sets undated. A show-specific print is a single-use garment and exhibition calendars move, whereas a plain branded set covers every stand you take that year. It also works for staff photography and around the office, which is where most of them end up anyway.
If the artwork is new, get a £150 sample in ahead of the bulk order. The fee is credited against it, so you are paying for time rather than for the garment. Sets on our wholesale tracksuits page start at $53 at the fifty-set minimum.
