Societies: Ordering Joggers in Bulk
By The Velocity Wear Team
A society jogger run starts at $22 a piece at the fifty-piece minimum, which most societies clear on a single sign-up round. The hard part is not the price, it is the calendar: production takes 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, so a committee that opens orders in freshers week needs the artwork finished before term starts, not after.
How does a committee reach fifty pieces?
Fifty sounds like a lot until you count who actually wants kit. Members, the committee itself, the team that competes, alumni who still turn up to socials, and the handful of people who buy a second pair in a different size for a friend. A society with a hundred names on the mailing list usually sells fifty pairs without effort if the sign-up closes on a date everyone knows.
Where societies come unstuck is splitting the run. Two colourways is two lots of fifty, because a colourway needing its own screens counts separately. So is a second design for the committee. The way through is one body colour, one front artwork, and a personalisation position for names or roles, which does not split the minimum. The order itself is placed from the wholesale joggers page.
When in the academic year should the order be placed?
Work backwards from the date people want to wear them. Add delivery transit to the 10 to 15 working days of production, then add however long your sign-up window runs, then add the week the committee will spend arguing about the shade of the crest. A run that lands in late October has to have artwork approved in the first days of the month.
The second window is January, for societies that miss the autumn run or that pick up new members after the winter break. The third is the spring order for leavers, which overlaps with school leavers season and gets busier. Committees handing over in the summer should place the autumn order before they hand over, not after, because a new committee inherits the deadline without the context. Our schools and leavers page covers how the same timing logic applies to year-group orders.
How do you fund the order before the money comes in?
Most societies collect from members first and place the order once the money is in, which is why the sign-up deadline matters more than anything else. Set it as a hard date, take payment at sign-up rather than promising to chase later, and size the run to what has been paid for plus a small buffer for the people who will appear afterwards.
The per-piece price falls as quantity rises, with tiers at 50 to 99, 100 to 249, 250 to 499, 500 to 999 and 1,000 upwards, and up to 35% off the fifty-piece price at the top end. A society that combines its order with a sister society on the same campus can cross a tier and cut the price for both, provided the artwork is genuinely identical.
Which sizes should a society order?
Take the sizes from the actual sign-up form rather than a generic curve. Student orders skew towards small and medium more than a general adult order does, and a chunk of buyers will deliberately size up for a looser fit. Ask for a size on the form, publish the garment measurements next to it, and you will not spend November swapping pairs in a corridor.
Hold four or five spare pairs across the middle sizes. They cover the damaged pair, the late joiner and the committee member who ordered the wrong size, and they cost far less than a second production run. There is more on building a curve that sells through in our piece on size splits for a bulk joggers order, and on the calendar side in how long bulk joggers take to make.
