Societies: Ordering Towels in Bulk
By The Velocity Wear Team
Society towels are quoted per job, ordered at 50 pieces per design and produced in 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval. For a university committee the hard parts are the calendar and the handover: the order has to land before freshers week, and the files have to survive the committee that placed it leaving in June.
What do societies use branded towels for?
Sports and swim societies use them as kit, which is the strongest case. Rowing, swimming, water polo and triathlon clubs all need towels anyway, so branding them costs the difference rather than the whole amount. Other societies use them as sale items at a freshers fair, where they sit at a higher price than a tee and sell in smaller numbers.
A third use is the social one: tour towels, varsity items and anything sold to mark a specific event. Those carry a date and therefore have no second life, which is fine if the run is sized to the group attending. The weights available are set out on our wholesale towels page.
How do you order around freshers week?
Order in the summer, which is exactly when nobody is around to do it. Production is 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, delivery transit is on top, and a September order is already too late to have stock on a stall in the first week of term.
The workable pattern is for the outgoing committee to place the order in June or July against what the incoming year will need, using artwork that does not name a year. That way the stock is sitting in a cupboard when term starts, and the new committee spends its first fortnight selling rather than ordering. The wider term-timing problem is covered on our schools and leavers page.
How does a committee budget a towel run?
Start from the minimum. 50 pieces per design is the entry point, sizes mixed freely, and the discount reaches 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. A committee tempted by the tier price should check the membership number first, because student societies turn over their entire audience every three years.
Budget for the sample too. A £150 sample, credited against the bulk order, is not wasted money for a committee that has never bought towels before, and it gives the treasurer something physical to show the rest of the committee before a few hundred pounds leaves the account.
Who owns the artwork when the committee changes?
Somebody has to, and it is rarely arranged in advance. Every year a society discovers that the only copy of the crest file was on a graduate laptop, and the reorder turns into a redraw. Store the approved artwork, the colour reference and the specification somewhere the society controls rather than an individual account.
With those files in place a repeat order needs no new approval and runs straight into production. Without them, a reorder is a new design with a new approval cycle, which is what turns a fortnight into a month. The same handover logic applies to anything else the society orders, including the kit covered in our autumn term planning post.
Payment delays student orders more often than anything else does. Society money usually sits with a students union, which has its own approval route, its own finance calendar and its own view of how fast an invoice gets paid. Find out what that route requires before the order is placed rather than afterwards, because an order waiting on a finance meeting is not an order in production, and the freshers date does not move to accommodate a signature that has not happened yet.
