Agencies: Ordering Polo Shirts in Bulk
By The Velocity Wear Team
Agencies order polos against a date, not a budget. The number to plan around is 10 to 15 working days of production from artwork approval, plus transit, on a minimum of fifty pieces per design from $18 each. Everything that goes wrong on an agency job goes wrong before approval, so the useful work is getting the client to sign off artwork early.
How do you quote this to a client without guessing?
Quote the garment, the decoration and the delivery as three lines, because clients query a single blended number and accept a broken-down one. The garment price moves with quantity through bands at 50–99, 100–249, 250–499, 500–999 and 1,000+, reaching up to 35% below the fifty-piece price, so give the client two quantities and let them choose. Do not quote from memory on a campaign that was scoped six months ago — check the current figures on the wholesale polo shirts page before the number goes into a deck.
How close can you get to a brand guideline colour?
Closer on thread than on fabric, and closer on print than on either. Garment colour comes from a dyed stock range, so an exact brand blue is a match to the nearest available body rather than a custom dye at these quantities. Embroidery thread has a broad range and usually lands very close. A screen-printed mark can be mixed to a specified ink colour and is the most controllable of the three. If the guideline is strict, the order of operations is: pick the garment, then match thread or ink to the garment you actually have, and show the client that combination on a sample before the run.
What kills an agency deadline?
Three things, in order of frequency. Artwork that arrives as a low-resolution image pulled from a website rather than a vector file. A client approval loop that adds a week because the decision-maker is on leave. And a size list that never comes, because nobody wanted to ask a room of people their shirt size. Solve all three at briefing: ask for the logo in vector at the same time as the brief, name the one person who signs off, and open the size form on day one. What we need from the artwork side is set out in artwork setup for custom polo shirts.
Should the agency hold stock or order per campaign?
Hold stock if the client runs recurring events with the same branding, because a held box removes the lead time from the next brief entirely and you are only ever ordering to top it back up. Order per campaign if the artwork changes each time, which it usually does. A middle path works for agencies with several similar clients: order the plain garment in the shared body and colour, then decorate in batches as briefs land. Corporate rollouts on that pattern are covered on our corporate uniform page.
Is a sample worth the time on a short campaign?
A £150 sample, credited against the bulk order, buys you a physical object to put in front of a client who has only seen a mockup. That is worth two rounds of email on most jobs. It costs you roughly a fortnight, so take it when the campaign date is six weeks or more away and skip it when the client has already approved the same garment in a previous run.
If you cannot fit a sample in, at least send the client a photograph of the actual garment colour under normal light rather than the swatch render. Screen colour is where agency approvals go wrong most often, and a phone photo of a real shirt prevents an argument after fifty of them have been decorated.
