Corporate Uniforms for Cafes: cost
By The Velocity Wear Team
Cafe and coffee shop uniforms start at $20 a piece at our 50-piece minimum, with the price falling as the run grows — as much as 35% below that starting figure at the largest tier. Sizes are mixed however you need inside the 50. For a small cafe the budgeting question is not really the unit price; it is whether a team of five can sensibly use fifty garments.
What is the starting figure for a cafe order?
Twenty dollars a piece at fifty pieces of one design, before the tiers take effect at 100, 250, 500 and 1,000. Garment choice moves the number more than decoration does at these volumes: a tee, a polo and an apron are three different specifications and price differently, while the logo on them barely registers by comparison. Fabric weights are confirmed on the quote for your job rather than published as one number, because the three garments have nothing comparable to quote. The wholesale uniforms page lists the from-price and shows where each tier begins.
Is 50 pieces too many for a small cafe?
Less often than owners assume, once the counting is done properly. Five baristas each need three or four garments to keep a clean one available through the wash, which is twenty before anything else. Add aprons, which get destroyed faster than anything else behind a counter. Add spares for the part-timers who cover weekends. Add replacements for the inevitable coffee-and-bleach casualties over a year. Fifty stops looking generous somewhere around that point.
If it genuinely does not fit, the two routes are to split the fifty across one design rather than two — one polo in one colour rather than two colourways — or to order with another site if you have one. Each colourway carries its own fifty, so restraint on colours is the single most effective way to keep a small order efficient. The restaurants and hospitality page sets out what a counter team usually ends up wearing.
What does the cost per shift look like?
This is the framing that makes the spend make sense to an owner. A garment that survives a year of shifts across a rotating team is a small number when divided out, and the comparison is not against nothing — it is against staff wearing whatever they turned up in, which costs nothing and communicates nothing.
Three things sit outside the garment price and belong in the budget: the £150 sample if you take one, which is credited against the bulk order; delivery transit after the 10 to 15 working day production window; and any private label work such as woven neck labels or swing tags, quoted alongside. None of those are large, but they should not be discovered late. Small independents working through this for the first time may find the starting points for a small business uniform order useful, and the timing side is worth reading before you fix an opening date.
If the cafe is part of a small group, order for every site at once even when the sites open at different times. One run costs less per piece than several, the colour is guaranteed to match across the group, and the garments can be held centrally and released as each site needs them. The only real objection is storage, and a box of shirts takes up less room than most owners assume. The same logic applies to a single site ordering for the year rather than the quarter, provided there is somewhere dry to keep the stock.
