Corporate Uniforms for Offices: size splits
By The Velocity Wear Team
Size an office order from published measurements rather than from what people call themselves, and add a buffer in the two most common sizes for new starters. The fifty-piece minimum counts garments of a design, never sizes, so the split is yours to set freely. Offices with hybrid or distributed teams should assume a slightly wider spread than a single-site team needs.
Give people a deadline and a default, and publish both. Size collection across an office stalls not because anybody objects but because replying is never urgent, so a form with no closing date stays open indefinitely while the order waits behind it. Stating that anyone who has not replied by a given date will receive a specific size converts the task from optional into time-bound. It also gives you a clean way to close the list and get the run into production rather than waiting on the last four people.
How do you size an office without a fitting day?
Publish a measurement chart alongside the size form and ask people to check a garment they already own rather than to recall a label. Labels vary wildly between brands, and a self-reported size is the least reliable data in the whole process. A chest measurement in centimetres against the chart produces a far better answer than a dropdown of letters.
Where a site visit is possible, leaving a few sizes in a common area for a week beats any form. People try things on out of curiosity and write down what fits. The mechanics of translating measurements into a size run are covered in the fit and size run guide.
What size spread works for mixed teams?
Wider than a single-role team and flatter in shape. An office covers more variation in build than a crew or a kitchen brigade, so the curve has less of a pronounced peak and a longer usable tail at both ends. Ordering a deep block of two central sizes and thin but genuine coverage across the rest tends to fit the most people from the fewest pieces.
If you are choosing between a single unisex cut and separate fits, count the numbers first. Each cut is its own design carrying its own fifty-piece floor, so two fits at forty people each is a different order from one fit at eighty. Rates and what runs together are listed on the wholesale uniforms page.
How many spares cover new starters?
Enough to last until the next planned run, concentrated in the sizes the existing team already clusters around. Because the spares occupy units inside a minimum you were meeting anyway, they cost only the piece price, and they can push the run into a better band on the pricing page at the same time.
Record what is issued against each size as you go. One cycle of real issue data turns the next size split into arithmetic rather than judgement, and it is also the quickest way to spot that a particular cut runs small. How the programme fits together across an organisation is set out on the corporate and offices page.
Say something about fit in the communication that goes out with the size form, not just the measurements. Telling people the polo is cut close through the body, or that the shirt is generous and most colleagues take their usual size, removes the guesswork that produces a wave of exchange requests in week one. Two sentences of description alongside the chart consistently reduces the number of garments that come straight back.
