Bands: Ordering Towels in Bulk
By The Velocity Wear Team
Tour towels are quoted per job, made at a minimum of 50 pieces per design, and take 10 to 15 working days to produce from artwork approval. For a band the decision is a merch decision rather than a product one: a towel occupies a price point above a tee, sells in smaller numbers, and carries artwork far better than most people expect.
Does a tour towel sell?
At outdoor shows and summer festivals, consistently. Indoors in winter, less so. The towel sells to the part of your audience that already owns the tee and wants something different, which makes it a depth item rather than a volume one. Ordering it as though it will match tee numbers is the common mistake.
It has one clear advantage over a tee: no sizes. A towel is one specification for the whole audience, so there is no size curve to guess and no stock left in extra small at the end of the run. That alone makes the 50-piece minimum easier to plan than the same quantity of shirts. Sizes and weights are set out on our towels page.
How big should a merch run be for one tour?
Start at 50 for a first towel. The discount reaching up to 35% as quantity rises, across tiers of 50 to 99, 100 to 249, 250 to 499, 500 to 999 and 1,000 plus, makes a bigger run look cheap per piece, but unsold merch travels in a van for the rest of the tour and then sits in a spare room for years afterwards.
If the towel sells through in the first week of dates, reorder rather than regretting the small run. A repeat using the same approved artwork needs nothing redrawn, so it is 10 to 15 working days of production and transit. Scale the second order against real sell-through from the first, which is a far better number than any forecast.
What artwork works on a towel at arm’s length?
Bold and simple. A towel is seen unfolded on a merch table and folded in a bag, and the design has to survive both. Fine line work and small type that reads well on a shirt chest can disappear into the pile. Printed branding carries full colour and detail, which is what most band artwork needs.
Woven branding is the other option, built into the towel during manufacture and lasting the life of it, but it simplifies to a few colours and suits a logo or a wordmark rather than an illustration. For a band, print is usually right. The broader merch logic is on our bands and music page.
When does the run need to be finished?
Before the first date, with a margin. Production is 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, delivery transit sits on top, and merch has to be packed and distributed before anyone is on a bus. Working back from the first show, eight weeks is comfortable and four is tight.
Keep tour dates off the towel if the run is large. A dated towel is a write-off after the last show, while an undated one keeps selling online and at the next run of dates. If you are also planning a wider drop around the tour, the timing arguments in our post on black Friday planning for clothing brands apply to merch cycles too.
Packing space matters more than it sounds. Towels are bulkier than shirts for the money they represent, and a merch seller working out of a case and a van has a hard limit, so a large run can physically crowd out the lines that shift faster. Work the volume out before the order rather than at the first load-in. Splitting the run and posting a second box to a venue partway through the dates costs less than hauling stock around the country that will not sell until the final week.
