Wholesale T-Shirts for Retailers
By The Velocity Wear Team
Wholesale t-shirts for resale start at $13 a piece at 50, falling by up to 35% as the run grows. On a typical streetwear retail price that is a comfortable multiple, but only if the size curve is right. Dead stock in XS and 3XL is what actually eats a retailer's margin, not the unit price, so the buying decision is mostly about how the 50 is split.
What margin does a $13 blank leave?
Start from the landed cost, not the quoted one. Add decoration, private label, delivery and any duty into the per-piece figure before you compare it to a shelf price. A piece that costs $13 at 50 sits well below the retail price of a printed tee in most markets, and the gap widens at 250 and 500 where the tier discount starts to bite. What matters is that the margin has to absorb the sizes you do not sell. Price the drop on the assumption that the tail of the curve goes to sale. Our wholesale t-shirts page lists current from-prices, and the full wholesale range shows what else can ride in the same order.
What size curve should a first drop carry?
For a 50-piece first run, weight the middle hard. Something close to 4 small, 12 medium, 16 large, 12 extra large and 6 double extra large reflects how printed tees actually sell in most adult markets, and it leaves you a real read on demand rather than a flat guess. Never split a first drop evenly across seven sizes. If your audience skews one way, you will know after the first sell-through, and the second run is the one to shape precisely.
How often should you restock?
Reorder when you are about 60% through, not when you run out. Production is 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval plus transit, and a retailer who waits for an empty rail has a gap of a month with nothing to sell. Because the artwork is already set up, a repeat run is faster to get moving, but the manufacturing window does not shrink. Holding two staple colours on a rolling reorder and treating everything else as a drop is how most small labels manage it. Reordering and colour matching covers what changes between runs.
What makes a tee look like stock rather than merch?
Labels. A shirt with the manufacturer's neck label still in it reads as a printed blank, and customers price it accordingly. Custom woven neck labels, a tear-out label, a swing tag and a poly bag turn the same garment into a product. All of that is available on the same order at the same 50-piece minimum, and it is the smallest change a retailer can make that moves a tee up a price bracket. See labels and packaging for what each option involves.
Which fabric weight should a retail tee use?
Our tees are 150 to 240 GSM combed ring-spun cotton, in regular and boxy fits. Retail buyers can usually feel the difference between 180 and 240 GSM in the hand, and the heavier fabric supports a higher price without any other change to the product. Boxy fits sell strongly in streetwear and badly in general apparel, so match the fit to the shelf it is going on rather than to what is fashionable in the trade press.
How long does it take to get a drop on the shelf?
Production is 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, and transit sits on top of that. For a retailer that means a drop has to be decided roughly six weeks before it goes live, and longer if you want a sample in hand first at £150 credited against the order. The practical consequence is that a reactive drop, built around something happening this month, is very hard to do well. Labels, planned drops and staple restocks all reward working a season ahead, and the retailers who struggle are usually the ones treating a manufactured garment like a stocked one.
