Corporate Uniforms for Salons: size splits
By The Velocity Wear Team
Sizes mix freely inside the 50-piece minimum, so a salon is never forced to buy fifty of one size. The useful question is where to put the depth. Measure the team you have, add cover for the sizes that turn over fastest, and resist the urge to buy one of everything at the extremes — that is what fills a stockroom with garments nobody wears.
How do you break 50 pieces across a small salon team?
Start from headcount rather than from a standard curve. A salon of eight is a specific group of eight people, not a statistical sample, so ask each of them what they actually wear and write it down. Then add rotation: each person needs three or four garments to keep a clean one available while others are in the wash. Eight people at three pieces each is 24. The remaining 26 is your buffer, and that is where judgement comes in.
Put most of the buffer in the two sizes your team already clusters around. If six of eight stylists wear medium or large, those are the sizes a new starter is most likely to need, and they are the sizes that get replaced first when something is stained or torn. Our wholesale uniforms page covers the garment range a salon programme normally spans.
Why does dead stock build up in a salon order?
Because buyers order symmetrically. A run that goes two XS, six S, ten M, ten L, six XL, two 2XL looks tidy on a spreadsheet and almost never matches a real floor. Salons skew, sometimes heavily, and a symmetric run guarantees the tails sit untouched while the middle runs out within months.
The second cause is fit style. A smock, a fitted tee and an apron do not grade the same way, and a stylist who is a medium in one may be a large in another. Ordering the same split across three different garments moves the mismatch around rather than fixing it. Confirm the fit on the garment itself — the salon sample round is the place to do that, before 50 pieces are cut to the wrong assumption.
Should you size for the current team or the next one?
Both, with the weighting tilted towards the current team. Your existing staff are a known quantity and they are wearing the garment tomorrow; a hypothetical future stylist is not. What the future deserves is a handful of spares in the sizes most common in your local hiring pool, which in practice means the same middle band again.
If the salon runs juniors in a different colourway, remember each colourway is its own design with its own 50-piece minimum, so the two size splits are calculated independently. The salons and barbers page outlines how a floor is usually kitted across roles, towels included, and it is worth planning the roles before the sizes.
One practical habit: keep the final split on file with the order. When the restock comes round, the record of what ran out first is a better guide to the next split than anyone's recollection of it. General sizing and fit principles across apparel apply here too, and they are worth reading before the first run rather than after it.
If part of the team wears a different garment entirely — juniors in a tee, seniors in a smock — treat those as separate size exercises rather than one. They grade differently, they are worn differently, and the person who is a large in one is often not a large in the other. Doing the arithmetic twice takes ten minutes and prevents the most common form of surplus, which is a stack of the right size in the wrong garment.
