Wholesale Towels for Schools
By The Velocity Wear Team
Schools buy towels in three situations: swimming and PE stock held by the department, leavers gifts carrying a year group name, and fundraising stock sold through the parents association. All three sit on the same 50-piece minimum per design and the same 10 to 15 working day production window. Pricing is quoted per job, because towel weight and branding method vary so widely.
Which towels do schools actually need?
Department stock and gift stock are different products. Stock towels live in a cupboard, get borrowed by whoever forgot theirs, and are laundered on site or by a contractor. Gym weight suits them: it dries between lessons and survives a commercial cycle. Gift towels go home in a bag on the last day of term and are expected to feel like something worth keeping, which points at spa or hotel weight.
Trying to serve both with one specification usually disappoints on one side. If the budget only stretches to one, pick for the use that has an audience. A leavers towel that feels thin is remembered as a cheap gift. A departmental towel that feels luxurious just takes longer to dry. The full range of weights is set out on our towels page.
How does the 50-piece minimum fit a year group?
A year group is usually well over 50, so the minimum is rarely the obstacle. The obstacle is the number of designs. One towel carrying the school crest and the leaving year covers every pupil in that cohort and is a single order. Add a house colour and you have four designs, each needing 50, which is 200 towels for a cohort of 120.
Sizes and colours inside one design are mixed freely, so variation is fine as long as the artwork and the screens stay the same. If a printed name list is wanted, it sits inside the single design as long as everyone gets the same list. Individual names, one per towel, is a different job and should be priced as such. Our schools and leavers page sets out how the same logic applies to hoodies.
When should a school place the order against term dates?
Work backwards from the date the towels need to be in the building, not the date they are handed out. Production is 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, and delivery transit sits on top of that. Artwork approval usually takes a school longer than it takes us, because a crest has to be signed off by someone who is teaching all week.
A safe rule is to start the conversation two months before the handout date. That leaves room for a £150 sample, credited against the bulk order, and still leaves a fortnight of slack. Term planning for apparel generally is covered in our post on autumn term apparel planning.
Can pupil names go on the towels?
A full name list printed on every towel is common on leavers items and works well on a towel because there is room for it. Print handles small type better than weaving does, so a list of 120 names is a print job. Woven branding suits a crest or a short line of text rather than a block of names.
One caution worth passing to the committee: name lists date the item permanently, which is the point for a leavers gift and a problem for anything the school wants to reuse. Departmental stock should carry the crest alone, so a cupboard full of towels does not become unusable in September.
Storage is the last thing to sort before the boxes arrive, and it is routinely forgotten. A few hundred towels take up more room than anyone pictures, and the last fortnight of summer term is a poor moment to be looking for space. Agree where the stock will sit, who holds the key and who counts it out on handout day. Schools that skip that step end up with a pile in a corridor and no record of what went where, which makes next year order a guess rather than a calculation.
