How Hotels Buy Polo Shirts Wholesale
By The Velocity Wear Team
Hotels buy polo shirts in a rotation, not a headcount. Budget three shirts per person so one is worn, one is in the wash and one is on the shelf, which puts a thirty-person property comfortably over the 50-piece minimum at $18 a piece. Specify for the laundry first: the collar and the placket are what age, long before the logo does.
How many shirts does a rotation actually need?
Count the people who wear the garment on a shift, not the people on the payroll. Housekeeping and maintenance may hand shirts back at the end of a shift, in which case the pool is the size of the largest shift plus a margin. Front-of-house and spa staff keep their own, so they need three each. Then add a starter box — ten to fifteen pieces in the middle sizes — because seasonal hires arrive without notice and a new starter in an unbranded shirt is the version of the uniform your guests remember.
Which knit survives a commercial laundry?
Commercial washing is hotter and harsher than anything a shirt meets at home, and it is unforgiving of thin knits. Piqué holds up well because the textured structure hides the surface fuzzing that flat jersey shows within a month. Performance knits dry fast and resist creasing, which matters for spa and poolside teams who go through more changes a day. Whichever you pick, the collar is the tell: a knitted rib collar with a firm finish stays flat where a soft one curls. We set out the weight trade-offs in choosing fabric for wholesale polo shirts, and the current fabric options are listed on the wholesale polo shirts page.
Should the logo be printed or embroidered?
Embroidery for anything guest-facing. Thread does not crack, does not fade at 60 degrees and does not go chalky after a season of industrial detergent, and on a hotel crest the raised finish reads as deliberate rather than cheap. Print earns its place on back-of-house shirts where a large department name needs to be legible across a loading bay, or on a temporary shirt for a single event weekend. If the crest has fine serif type or a fading gradient, send it through before you commit and we will tell you what the needle can hold.
What else goes in the same order?
Most properties order the linen side at the same time, because the two arrive on the same delivery and the branding has to match across them. Embroidered towels for the spa, pool and gym come from the same artwork file, so the crest is one setup rather than two. Our wholesale towels page covers weights and border options. Ordering together also pools the quantity, and the volume discount rises to 35% at the top band.
How far ahead should a property order?
Production runs 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, and transit sits on top. Refurbishments and rebrands slip, so place the order against the date the rooms open rather than the date the signage goes up. If a launch date is genuinely fixed, take the £150 sample early — it is credited against the bulk order — and approve the artwork on that, which removes the longest delay from the schedule.
How should the shirts arrive on site?
Ask for cartons packed and labelled by size. A housekeeping office that has to open every box to find the mediums will lose half a day, and shirts handed out from a mixed pile end up worn a size too big. Individually bagged pieces also survive a stock cupboard better than folded stacks, which matters when the delivery arrives months before the last of it is issued. If names are embroidered, we bag and label those separately so they reach the right person.
