Retailers: Ordering Caps in Bulk

For a retailer, caps are the lowest-risk apparel line on the shelf: $12 a piece from at a fifty-piece minimum, no size curve to forecast and almost no fit returns. The decision that carries real risk is colourway count. Fifty pieces in one colour sells through; fifty pieces split across four colours leaves you with three slow movers and one you cannot restock under fifty.

What margin does a wholesale cap leave?

Start from the from-price of $12 at fifty pieces and work up the tiers. The bands are 50–99, 100–249, 250–499, 500–999 and 1,000+, with up to 35% off the fifty-piece price at the top. A retailer buying 250 sits meaningfully below the entry price, and because retail price for a branded cap does not fall with your cost, every tier you climb goes straight to margin. Our wholesale caps page carries the current from-price, and the rest of the catalogue is on the wholesale overview if you are building a broader buy.

How many colourways should a first buy carry?

Two, in most cases. One dark neutral — black or navy — and one colour that is recognisably yours. The dark one will be roughly two thirds of the sell-through and pays for the buy; the colour is what makes the shelf look like a brand rather than a blank rack. A third colour is worth adding only once you have a sales record telling you which direction to take it, and a fourth almost never earns its place in a first order. Caps are adjustable, so unlike tees you are not also multiplying across sizes — which is exactly why the temptation to over-colour is so strong.

How do you plan the restock?

Set your reorder trigger by lead time, not by shelf appearance. Production is 10–15 working days from artwork approval and delivery sits on top, so from the moment you decide to reorder you are around four weeks from stock landing. Count your weekly rate, multiply by five for safety, and reorder when you hit that number rather than when the shelf looks thin. The reorder still has to meet fifty pieces per design, so a slow colourway can strand you — another argument for narrow depth. The mechanics of a repeat run are in reordering wholesale caps in colour.

What if you are selling into other shops?

Caps travel well into wholesale because they need no fitting room and take almost no shelf space per unit. That changes your quantity maths: a line sheet with three stockists behind it justifies a run of 250 or 500, and the price you land at makes a two-step margin possible. Selling your clothing brand to retailers covers the terms and the paperwork that step needs.

What should the swing tag carry?

On a cap the tag does more selling than it does on a folded tee, because it hangs from the closure at eye level on a rail. Get four things onto it: the brand mark, the price, a barcode, and one line that says what the cap is — the crown structure, the fabric, or the fit. Shoppers picking up an adjustable cap are not worried about size, so the line is better spent on material or story than on measurements. Have the tags applied during production rather than in your own stockroom; at fifty pieces hand-tagging is an evening's work, and at 250 it is a day nobody has. Individual polythene bagging is worth adding at the same time for anything going onto a shop floor, since a cap that has been handled by twenty customers stops looking new fast. One more detail that pays for itself: print the tag on a stock heavy enough to survive the rail. A flimsy tag curls within a week and every curled tag on a display reads as a tired line, whatever the cap underneath it is like.