Pricing Corporate Uniforms for Resale
By The Velocity Wear Team
If you are reselling uniforms, your margin is built on landed cost rather than on the quoted unit price. Take the $20 entry rate for corporate uniforms, apply whatever band your volume reaches, then add decoration, freight and your own handling before you set a shelf price. The gap between quoted and landed is where most resale margins quietly disappear.
Begin by writing down every cost between the factory and your customer, including the ones that never appear on an invoice. Freight and the garment rate are obvious. Less obvious are the hours spent collecting sizes on a client's behalf, the storage the stock occupies, the pieces that never sell, and the replacements you supply when something goes wrong. Resellers who account for those properly tend to quote higher and win the same work, because the price reflects a service rather than a garment. Those who do not tend to be busy and unprofitable at once.
What margin can you build on a wholesale uniform?
Nobody outside your business can tell you the right percentage, because it depends on what you carry, how long stock sits and what service you wrap around it. What the wholesale side can tell you is how much room the volume creates. The bands on the pricing page reach up to 35% below the fifty-piece rate at the top tier, and that whole difference is available to you as either a sharper retail price or a wider margin.
Set the price against your landed cost per piece and hold that figure somewhere you will see it again. Resellers who price off the original quote and then absorb freight and label costs out of margin tend to discover the problem a season later, when the reorder is priced off the same wrong number.
Should you price per garment or per kit?
Kits price better for you and buy better for your customer. Selling a three-piece starter set rather than a single shirt raises the value of each transaction and clears the fifty-piece floor faster, which pulls the whole order into a stronger band. The items themselves stay flexible: a shirt, polo, apron and outer layer can be quoted as one programme through the wholesale uniforms range even though each design still needs its own fifty.
Per-garment pricing still has a place for top-ups. Customers who bought a kit in spring want one replacement shirt in autumn, and having a single-unit price published saves a conversation, even if the margin on it is deliberately higher.
How do you handle sizes that sell slower?
Plan for them at order stage rather than discounting them later. The fifty-piece floor is per design and the sizes inside it are yours to distribute, so the tail sizes can be ordered thin without breaking the run. Ordering a deep block of the two or three middle sizes and a handful of each outlier keeps the money in stock that moves.
Where a customer wants a full size run guaranteed, price that as a service rather than swallowing it. Holding every size in stock has a real carrying cost, and it is reasonable for that to show up somewhere in what you charge.
When does reordering beat a bigger first run?
When your design is unproven or your customer base is still forming. Production takes 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, which is short enough that a mid-season top-up is realistic rather than theoretical. Against that, a repeat run starts at the entry band again, so the question is whether the discount you would gain outweighs the stock you would carry. Our post on restaurant reorders covers how repeat runs behave, and the full cost picture is laid out in budgeting a bulk uniform order.
