Corporate Uniforms for Salons: reordering
By The Velocity Wear Team
Salon uniforms are consumables more than they are assets: bleach, colour and constant hot washing take pieces out of rotation faster than in almost any other trade. Plan the restock into the year rather than treating it as a surprise. A repeat run needs the same 50-piece minimum, the same design, and a note about colour matching if old and new garments will be worn side by side.
How do you keep the second run matching the first?
The decoration side is the easy half. Artwork files, logo width, placement measurements and thread or ink references are held against the original order, so a repeat is run from the record rather than rebuilt from scratch. Quote the original order reference and the mark comes back identical.
The fabric side needs a conversation. Garments dyed months apart can land fractionally different in shade — a normal characteristic of dyeing rather than a fault — and on a salon floor where four people stand within a metre of each other, that is visible. If matching matters, say so when you place the repeat, and consider replacing a whole role or a whole branch in one run rather than topping up individuals. The wholesale uniforms page is where a repeat quote starts.
What should be recorded after the first delivery?
Keep a short file rather than a long one. Five lines is enough.
- Garment, colourway and the exact size split you received.
- Decoration method, logo width in millimetres and its distance from the shoulder seam.
- Thread or ink references, and which brand colour was treated as the one that had to be right.
- Neck labelling and any swing tags, because these are set during production and cannot be added later.
- Which sizes ran out first, noted six months in. This is the most useful line in the whole record.
That last point is what turns a restock from guesswork into arithmetic. The salons and barbers page covers the full floor kit if you are adding towels or a second role to the repeat.
How often does a salon need to restock?
It depends almost entirely on colour workload. A barbershop doing cuts alone gets far longer out of a garment than a salon running colour all day, where staining takes pieces out of rotation constantly. Rather than guessing an interval, watch the middle sizes: when the two most common sizes drop below a fortnight of cover, the reorder is already late, because production is 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval before transit.
One financial note. Tiers are calculated per order rather than accumulated across the year — they step at 50, 100, 250, 500 and 1,000 pieces, reaching up to 35% off the 50-piece price — so three small top-ups cost more than one planned annual run of the same total. If the salon can forecast a year, order a year. The mechanics of running the same design again are the same across every product in the range.
Budget for it properly rather than treating each restock as an unexpected cost. A salon that knows roughly how many garments it loses to colour and bleach in a year can put that number in the annual plan and order against it, which is both easier on the accounts and calmer to manage than finding the money in a hurry every few months. The figure only needs to be approximately right in the first year; after that, the record of what was replaced tells you exactly what to budget for the next one, and the order stops being a decision and becomes a line item.
