What a Minimum Order Actually Means
By The Velocity Wear Team
Our minimum is 50 pieces per design, not 50 pieces per order. The sizes inside those 50 are entirely yours to arrange, so a run can be two smalls and forty-eight extra-larges if that is what your people need. What creates a second minimum is a second design — and a colourway that needs its own setup counts as one.
Is the minimum per order or per design?
Per design. The number exists because of setup, not because of a warehouse rule. Before a single garment is decorated, someone separates the artwork, makes screens or digitises a stitch file, mixes inks to your colour, and runs test pulls until the result matches the approved sample. That work costs the same whether twenty garments follow it or two hundred. Fifty is the point where the setup stops dominating the per-piece price. Below it, you would be paying mostly for preparation and only incidentally for clothing. The range and the starting prices are on the wholesale page.
How do sizes sit inside 50 pieces?
Freely. There is no per-size minimum, no fixed size pack and no obligation to order a tidy pyramid. A gym ordering staff kit can take exactly the sizes on the rota. A school can order to the actual list of names. This matters more than the headline number does, because the usual reason buyers fear a minimum is that they imagine having to take ten of a size nobody wears. You do not, and building the split sensibly is the subject of building a size curve for a bulk order.
What counts as a separate design?
Anything that needs its own setup. A different logo is a different design, obviously. Less obviously, so is the same logo printed in different ink colours, because the screens have to be remade. A garment colour change frequently counts too: dark artwork on a light garment and the reverse of it on a dark garment are two print setups, not one. Switching product entirely — a hoodie and a t-shirt with matching artwork — is always two, because they are different garments cut from different fabric.
What does not create a second minimum is variation that requires no new setup: sizes, as above, and usually a name or number added by a process that handles variable data. If you are unsure whether a change trips the line, ask before you plan the budget around it. It is a quick answer and it moves the total by a lot.
What if you genuinely need fewer than 50?
Then the honest options are to find a use for the balance or to test the design first. Staff kit programmes often absorb the extra as spares for new starters. Clubs sell the remainder at cost. Brands hold the overflow as replacement stock. If you simply want to see and feel the garment before committing, a sample is £150 and the fee is credited against the bulk order, so it is not money spent twice. What we will not do is quietly run 30 pieces at a 50-piece price, because that price would not be honest.
One more thing worth knowing before you decide how many to order: the per-piece cost falls as the quantity rises, by up to 35% against the 50-piece figure at the top tier. Ordering slightly above your immediate need is sometimes cheaper in total than ordering exactly what you need now and running a second job later, and the arithmetic behind that is in how volume discounts really work.
