Your First Bulk Uniform Order, Step by Step
By The Velocity Wear Team
Six steps: enquiry, quote, artwork, sample, production, delivery. The minimum is fifty pieces per design with sizes mixed freely, production takes 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, and a sample is £150 credited against the bulk order. Most of the calendar is spent on the decisions before production, not on production itself.
What do you send with the first enquiry?
Garment type, rough quantity, colours, your logo and the date you need the kit in hand. Even approximate answers are enough to produce a usable quote, and the date is the field that determines whether the plan works at all. If you do not yet know the split between shirts, polos, aprons and outer layers, say so and quote the whole uniforms programme rather than guessing at one line.
It helps to name the environment too. A kitchen, a warehouse and a showroom pull toward different fabrics and weights, and mentioning it early means the first quote is close rather than a starting position to be revised twice.
How does a quote turn into a price per piece?
Garment, decoration and quantity, in that order of influence. Corporate uniforms start from $20 per piece at fifty units, with jackets and other outer layers quoted per job because construction varies too much for a list price. Quantity then does the heavy lifting: the tiers sit at 50 to 99, 100 to 249, 250 to 499, 500 to 999 and 1,000 upward, with up to 35% coming off the fifty-piece rate at the top. The pricing page sets the structure out.
Ask for the tier above the one you were planning. Seeing both figures side by side often changes the decision, because the gap between fifty and a hundred and fifty pieces is usually smaller than people expect and the spare stock solves problems all year.
When does the production clock actually start?
At artwork approval, not at the order. Artwork is proofed back to you showing size and placement on the garment, and nothing is cut, screened or stitched until that proof is signed. Every day the proof waits is a day added to the delivery date, which is why a nominated approver matters more than any other piece of project management here. Fabric weight and hand-feel are worth settling before that point, and our GSM explainer covers what to ask for.
Sampling sits just before approval on a first order and is worth the two weeks it adds. You get the actual garment, in the actual fabric, with the actual decoration, and the £150 comes back off the bulk invoice. Skipping it is defensible on a repeat of something you already run and rarely defensible on a first order.
What arrives, and when?
Cartons, labelled by design and size, on a pallet for larger runs, with a packing list to count against. Delivery covers the UK, the USA and Europe, with invoicing available in seven currencies, so transit time depends on where it is going. Add that leg to the 10 to 15 working days rather than treating the build window as the whole schedule.
Then check it properly on arrival while the consignment is still together. The common opening-order errors, including under-ordering and leaving approval too late, are collected in the mistakes almost everyone makes on a first clothing order.
The single habit that makes the second order easier is keeping a record of the first. Garment specification, colour references, approved artwork files, the size split you actually used and one garment held back as a physical reference, all filed together. A repeat order built from that takes a fraction of the time and skips both the sampling step and most of the approval, which is why businesses that run a uniform programme properly find the process shrinks every year rather than repeating itself in full. The first order is the one that takes the work; the ones after it are mostly a quantity decision.
