Why hoodies outlast everything else you order
Order branded kit for a team of twenty, then do an honest audit eighteen months later. The tees have gone to the gym bag or the bin. The polos are worn on site days and washed to death. The hoodies are still in circulation — and not only at work. They turn up on the school run, at the football, in the pub on a Sunday. That is the entire argument for hoodies as branded clothing: it is the one garment your team will wear when nobody is asking them to.
For a brand, that beats unit price. A £30 hoodie worn two hundred times costs you around 15p per impression. A £9 tee worn twice costs £4.50 per impression. Cheap kit is usually the expensive option, just on a delay.
GSM is the number that decides everything
GSM — grams per square metre — is the weight of the fabric, and it is the single spec that separates a hoodie people keep from one they quietly stop wearing. Most suppliers won't put it on the listing, which tells you something.
- 240–260 GSM — the budget tier. Fine for a one-day event where the garment is essentially a walking sign. It will go thin and misshapen inside a dozen washes.
- 280–300 GSM — the sensible corporate and club weight. Warm enough for a British autumn, structured enough to hold a left-chest logo square, and it survives a working year.
- 320–350 GSM and up — heavyweight. Genuinely nice to wear, noticeably more expensive, and worth it when the hoodie is the gift rather than the uniform.
If you are choosing between a 260 GSM hoodie and a 300 GSM one and the difference is £4 a unit, take the 300. That £4 is the difference between a garment that gets worn and one that gets stored.
Brushed back or loopback — it changes the print
Inside a hoodie you'll find either brushed-back fleece (soft, fluffy, warm) or loopback (flatter, more textured, cooler to wear). The outer face matters too. A heavily brushed cotton-rich face has loose fibres that can migrate up through a print over time, softening fine detail — a phenomenon printers call fibrillation. A tighter, flatter face holds crisp DTF detail far better.
So if your logo has 1pt keylines or small type, ask what the face fabric is before you fall in love with the softest sample in the box. We'd rather tell you that at quote stage than after 40 hoodies are boxed.
Print or embroider a hoodie?
Left-chest embroidery is the default for corporate work, and for good reason: it reads as permanent rather than promotional. Cost is driven by stitch count, not by size on its own — a dense filled shape can be 12,000 stitches where a linear wordmark of the same width is 4,000. Digitising is a one-off setup that we keep on file, so your reorder next year matches this year exactly.
The honest caveat most suppliers skip: embroidery on a heavyweight brushed hoodie can pucker if the backing isn't specified properly, because the fabric has more give than a polo piqué. It is a solvable problem — cut-away backing, correct hooping, the right underlay — but it is a real one, and it is why a cheap embroidered hoodie often looks worse than a cheap embroidered polo.
For large back prints, gradients, photographic artwork or anything with more than four colours, DTF is the better tool. It sits on the surface as a thin flexible film, handles colour blends embroidery simply can't, and doesn't care about stitch count. We cover the trade-off in more detail in printed versus embroidered workwear.
Where the branding goes
Left-chest is the safe, professional default. A back print between the shoulder blades is the one people actually see across a car park or a golf course. Sleeve prints look considered and cost little. Two things to avoid: printing across the front pouch pocket, where the seam distorts the artwork, and printing over the hood seam, where the fabric doubles.
The honest bit: when a hoodie is the wrong order
Hoodies are a poor choice for client gifting when you don't know sizes. A mug or a keepsake fits everyone; a size M hoodie sent to someone who wears XL is an awkward gift and an awkward conversation. They're also wrong for front-of-house hospitality, where a performance polo at £34 reads far smarter. And if your budget only stretches to 240 GSM, buy fewer better tees instead — a thin hoodie flatters nobody's brand.
What a 20-piece run actually involves
Twenty units is a normal order for us, not a favour. You'll need a size spread rather than a flat count — see how many branded shirts a small business actually needs — plus one decision on colour. Darker bodies hide wear and hold prints better; if you're weighing colour, this piece on colours that survive 20 washes is worth five minutes.
Browse the corporate and teamwear collection for the garments we stock, then send us your logo and we'll produce a free mock-up on the actual hoodie colour you're considering. No commitment, and it takes the guesswork out of the one decision that's hardest to reverse.
