How Restaurants Buy Jackets & Outerwear Wholesale
By The Velocity Wear Team
Restaurant outerwear has two jobs and they barely overlap. Front of house needs something that looks right at the pass and in the doorway; back of house and delivery staff need something that survives heat, grease and a cold walk to the bins. Jackets are quoted per job, and the minimum is fifty pieces per design.
What do front and back of house each need?
Front of house wants a clean shell with small, precise branding — an embroidered chest logo on a softshell reads correctly in a dining room, where a large back print does not. Back of house wants something washable that nobody minds ruining. Outdoor service, terraces and delivery riders push the requirement further again, towards a lined coach jacket or a puffer. The restaurants and hospitality page covers the rest of the uniform these sit on top of.
Which fabrics survive a kitchen?
Nothing near a flame or a fryer should be a technical shell, because synthetics do not forgive heat. Keep puffers and softshells for front of house, terraces and outside work, and dress the kitchen in cotton-faced layers instead. For colour, dark shades hide grease and red wine while mid-greys show every splash. Grease is a stain that repeated washing sets rather than removes, so pick the shade for the worst night, not the best photograph.
Fleece is the middle ground for cold rooms and cellars, and what to check on a fleece jacket goes through weight, loft and pilling.
How should a restaurant split fifty jackets?
A single site rarely has fifty staff, so the practical routes are to standardise one shell across every role and vary only the colour of the embroidery thread, or to order once for two years and hold the spares in the sizes that turn over most. Sizes mix freely inside the minimum, so weighting the fifty towards the sizes your rota actually wears costs nothing. Groups with several sites clear fifty on one design without trying, and that is where the volume tiers start to matter — up to 35% comes off as quantity rises.
The wholesale jackets page sets out the styles, and what to order alongside them is in staff uniforms for restaurants and cafes.
How long before an opening should you order?
Allow 10–15 working days of production from artwork approval and transit on top. An opening date is not a target you can move, so build in a week of slack and approve artwork before the fit-out finishes. A £150 sample, credited against the bulk order, is worth it when the shell colour has to match a fit-out palette rather than a brand guideline.
Who should own the uniform order?
One person, usually the general manager rather than head office, because they are the one who knows the rota and the sizes. Uniform orders drift when three people each own part of them: somebody collects sizes, somebody else approves artwork, and nobody owns the delivery date. Name the owner before the quote, and give them the authority to close the size list on a stated day.
Keep a simple record of what was ordered, in which sizes and against which artwork file. A restaurant that reorders once a year from a written spec spends ten minutes doing it. One that reorders from memory rediscovers the same questions about thread colour and logo position every time, and usually ends up sampling again.
The last piece is storage. Outerwear takes more space than tees, and a fifty-piece order needs somewhere dry that is not the cellar. Agree where the spares will live before the boxes arrive.
