Branding Options for Societies
By The Velocity Wear Team
Society kit can carry a custom woven neck label, a tear-out label, a swing tag and its own bagging, alongside the crest itself. For most committees the money is best spent on the crest and the placement, with a woven neck label added if the society name matters inside the collar. Bagging by name is the detail that makes a handout day painless.
What can a society put on a neck label?
The society name, the founding year, the university or a short motto, woven or printed inside the collar in place of the supplier mark. Keep it to a few words: a woven label two or three centimetres wide holds far less than a chest print, and a crest with fine detail usually needs a simplified version for that size. Committees that get this right agree the reduced artwork once and reuse it on every run. The student and leavers section lists the garments this suits.
Where does a society crest belong on the garment?
A left chest mark reads as kit rather than merchandise and works on every garment in a range. A large back print suits sports clubs and anything worn at fixtures, where the name needs to be legible across a pitch. A sleeve position is useful when the chest already carries a sponsor or a union mark. The measurements that make each placement look intentional rather than approximate are set out in our guide to print placement and sizing.
How should kit be bagged for a handout?
Individually, and marked by size, if the committee is handing out sixty pieces at one event. Sorting a bulk-packed box on a union floor while forty people queue is the part of the process nobody plans for. Bagging by size is agreed before the run ships, and it costs a conversation rather than a redesign. For societies selling pieces rather than issuing them, a swing tag starts to earn its place at that point, because the garment is being bought rather than collected. Browse the wholesale catalogue for what else can be finished the same way.
Which decoration holds up on a society hoodie?
Embroidery for a crest with defined shapes, since stitch survives repeated washing and gives the piece a heavier feel. Screen printing for bold, simple artwork in a single colour or two. DTF where the crest has gradients or fine detail that stitch would lose. 3D puff for a raised effect on a cap front rather than a chest. Appliqué and patches are a further option worth knowing about, and we cover them in our piece on patches and woven labels.
Whichever route you pick, approve the label and the crest artwork together. Production runs 10 to 15 working days from that approval, and a collar detail signed off a week late moves the delivery of the whole order by the same week.
Fix the crest colours as named references rather than as a picture. A society crest pulled from a web page is usually a low-resolution image whose colours shift between screens, and asking a supplier to match it is asking them to guess. Supplying vector artwork with the colours named means the same shade appears on a hoodie this year and a polo next year, across two decoration methods and two different committees. That piece of housekeeping is what separates a society whose kit looks like a set from one whose kit looks like four separate orders.
Check the union rules before anything is drawn rather than afterwards. Most unions publish guidance on how their name and marks may be used by affiliated societies, and finding out after artwork approval means new artwork, a new approval and a delivery date that has moved.
