Tracksuits for Societies: size splits
By The Velocity Wear Team
Use one form with a measurement chart attached and a deadline that closes a week early, then order to the count you get plus a few spares. Sizes mix freely inside the 50-set minimum, so the split can be exactly whatever your society needs. The difficulty is never the manufacturing — it is getting two hundred students to answer a question once.
How do you get sizes out of a group chat?
Do not use the group chat. Use a form, post the link once, pin it, and say clearly what happens to people who do not fill it in. Attach a chart with chest and inside leg measurements in centimetres next to each size, because students order the size they wish they were otherwise.
Tie the form to payment if you can. A sign-up that requires money attached filters out the maybes immediately and gives you a count you can order against. Sets are quoted per set on our wholesale tracksuits page, and student group work is described on our schools and leavers page.
What split works when everyone wants it oversized?
Take it seriously rather than correcting for it. If a society wants a relaxed fit, the answer is to say so on the form and let people order their normal size in a garment that is cut generously, not to have everybody size up independently and end up with a distribution skewed two sizes to the right.
The risk of uncorrected sizing up is the jogger. An oversized top is a style; an oversized jogger is a garment nobody wears. State on the form whether the fit is standard or relaxed, and how each maps to a body measurement. A hoodie fit and sizing guide for brands explains how fit and measurement relate.
How do you deal with late joiners?
With spares, ordered inside the original run. Three or four sets in whichever sizes dominate your society will cover the people who appear in week four, and they cost a fraction of what a second order would. The minimum is 50 sets per design, so there is no small top-up run available to fall back on.
Hold the spares centrally with one named person responsible, and record who takes what. A society that loses track of its spare stock discovers in March that it has none, and no record at all of where the sets went or who is wearing them.
Decide in advance what a late joiner pays. Charging them the same as everyone else is simplest and keeps the committee out of an argument, even though the spare set was funded by the original group. Write the rule into the sign-up post so it is settled before anybody has to apply it, and the treasurer inherits a policy rather than a negotiation. The other half of that rule is what happens when the spares run out, which is that the next order waits for the following year. Saying so up front converts a stream of individual requests into a single answer everybody has already read.
What should be left off the sign-up form?
Colour choices, unless you genuinely intend to run two designs at 50 sets each. Free-text size fields, which produce answers like "medium-ish". And anything optional, because every optional field is a reason for somebody to stop filling the form in and come back to it later, which they will not.
Keep it to name, size, payment and a personalisation field if you are offering one. The general principles of getting a size run right, including what to do with the distribution once you have it, are covered in apparel sizing and fit.
