Minimum Order for Wholesale Caps
By The Velocity Wear Team
The minimum order for wholesale caps is fifty pieces per design. Sizes mix freely inside that fifty, and for embroidered work so do cap colours. What starts a new fifty is a change to the artwork itself — a different logo, different text, or a colourway that needs its own screens under screen printing. Two designs means two runs of fifty, even on the same blank.
What counts as one design?
One set of artwork, decorated in one position, is one design. Fifty caps carrying your logo stitched on the front is a single order, whether those fifty are black, stone and olive or all one colour. The moment the mark itself changes — a department name under the logo, a second club crest, a different year on a leavers cap — you have two designs. This is the single most common misunderstanding in a first order, and it is worth resolving before you build a spreadsheet around a number that does not exist.
Can we mix sizes and colours inside the fifty?
Sizes, always. Most caps are adjustable anyway — snapbacks, strapbacks and dad caps all size themselves on the wearer — so the size question only arises on a fitted run, and even then the fifty can be split across head sizes however you want. Colours are freer than people expect for embroidery, because the thread runs the same regardless of what it is running on. Screen printing is the exception: each ink colour needs a screen, and a colourway that forces a different ink can count separately. Say what you want when you ask for the quote and we will tell you which side of the line it falls on.
Why is there a minimum at all?
Because most of the work in a cap order happens once, not fifty times. Artwork is digitised into a stitch file, threads are matched, the machine is set and a first-off is checked against the approval. That effort is identical whether the run is ten caps or five hundred. Fifty is the point where it spreads thinly enough that the per-piece price is honest rather than dominated by setup. It also keeps the price ladder meaningful: our pricing tiers all measure from that fifty-piece figure, including the discount ceiling of 35%.
What if you need more than one design?
Order both, each at fifty, and take the benefit where it exists. The quantity tiers look at what you are placing overall, so a hundred caps across two designs is not priced as two isolated small orders. What it will not do is let one design run at thirty. If you genuinely only need thirty of a variant, the usual workaround is to drop the variant and use a shared mark, then differentiate with cap colour instead. Repeat runs follow the same rule, which can I reorder the same design later goes into, and the money side is in how much wholesale caps cost. Current headwear options are listed on wholesale caps.
How far above fifty should you go?
Fifty is the floor, not the recommendation. Decide the number by how long you want the stock to last, because a repeat run also needs fifty and you cannot top up with twenty. For staff kit, work out your headcount, allow one and a half caps per person and ten per cent for churn, then add whatever covers the next twelve months of new starters — that is usually somewhere between fifty and a hundred. For retail, take your honest weekly sales estimate, halve it, and buy six months of that. The tier structure rewards the decision either way: crossing from 50–99 into 100–249 is the largest single price step you will see, and it typically costs less in total than placing two runs of fifty a few months apart. The only case for staying exactly at fifty is genuine uncertainty about whether the design is right, and that is what a sample is for rather than a short production run.
