How Charities Buy T-Shirts Wholesale
By The Velocity Wear Team
Charities order t-shirts from 50 pieces per design, from $13 each, with sizes mixed freely. The arithmetic that matters is unit cost against what each shirt returns, whether that is a sale, a sponsored place or the visibility of a hundred volunteers in the same colour on the day. Higher quantity lowers the per-piece price by up to 35% from the 50-piece figure, but only if the shirts get used.
How should a charity work out the quantity?
Start with committed numbers rather than hoped-for ones. Count confirmed volunteers, confirmed runners or confirmed sellers, and treat everything above that as speculative. The temptation is to order into a better price band, and sometimes that genuinely pays — the extra pieces can cost less than the saving they unlock. But a box of unsold shirts is a full loss, not a discount. If the design is not date-stamped with a year or an event name, surplus stock carries forward and the calculation changes completely, which is a strong argument for a design without a date on it.
What keeps the unit cost down?
Four decisions do most of the work. One design rather than three, because every design carries its own 50-piece minimum and splits your quantity across bands. Fewer print colours, since screen printing charges a setup per colour — a strong one-colour design often outperforms a busy four-colour one at a fraction of the cost. One garment colour, for the same reason. And a lighter combed ring-spun cotton at the 150 GSM end of the range where the shirt is worn for an event rather than as workwear. The wider cost structure of a bulk tee order is set out in bulk custom t-shirt pricing.
How do you size volunteers you have never met?
Collect what you can and guess the rest deliberately. For a registered group, a form with chest measurements next to the size names produces far better data than letters alone. For walk-up volunteers, weight the curve to the middle sizes and keep a handful at each extreme rather than a full spread. There is no extra charge for a wide size range inside the 50, so the only cost of over-reaching is the shirts left in the box afterwards.
Does a sample make sense on a charity budget?
It costs £150 and is credited against the bulk order, so on any order that proceeds it is not an additional cost. For a campaign that repeats annually, it is clearly worth it — you get a reference garment and a check on the print before a large run. For a one-off with a very small order, fix the specification tightly instead and accept the garment as described. More on making the money work harder is in charity t-shirts: raise more and waste less.
Are the shirts being sold or given away?
The answer changes everything about the order. A shirt that is sold has to be worth the price to someone who is not already committed to the cause, which means the design has to work as a garment and not only as a message. A shirt that is given to volunteers has a different job: making a team visible and countable on the day, which favours a single strong colour and a large, legible mark over anything subtle. A shirt handed to a sponsored runner is a third case again, and it needs to survive a training block as well as the event itself, so the weight should sit higher in the 150 to 240 GSM range.
Decide which of the three you are buying before you brief the design, because a compromise shirt that tries to be all of them tends to sell poorly and look unremarkable on the day.
Weights and from-prices are on the wholesale t-shirts page, and the charities and fundraising page covers the rest of the range, including hoodies and caps for volunteer teams.
