Count wear days, not heads
Most first orders arrive at a number the same way: eight staff, so eight shirts. That is the order that comes back to us in week three with an email beginning "is there any chance of a quick top-up run". The better starting point is wear days. A shirt worn five days a week, washed every Saturday and back on the body by Monday morning is being asked to do something a shirt worn twice a month never is.
The rule we give customers is simple. Three garments per person for daily wear. Two for part-time, shift or occasional wear. One for anyone who genuinely wears it a handful of times a year — the director who does two trade shows, the weekend van driver, the person who covers reception in August.
The arithmetic for a team of eight
Say four full-time front-of-house staff, two part-time, and two directors who appear at events. That is 12 + 4 + 2 = 18 garments. Add a small buffer — two shirts, no more — for new starters, a spill, or the one that gets left in a hotel. Twenty pieces.
That number is not a coincidence. Twenty is where the useful price break sits on most decorated garments, and it is where our minimum starts. A premium custom t-shirt is £22 at 20–49 units; a performance polo is £34. Ordering 14 pieces costs more per unit and leaves you short. Ordering 40 when you need 20 leaves half a box in a cupboard until the logo changes.
Splitting the order across garments
A single garment type rarely covers a real working week. The split that survives contact with a British year is usually two polos and one tee per person for daily wear, with a fleece or hoodie held separately for the four months it is actually needed. Polos take a left-chest embroidery well and read as uniform; tees take DTF cleanly and cost roughly a third less. You can browse the full range in corporate teamwear.
If you want the full cost picture before committing, our guide on how much branded workwear costs in the UK breaks down the decoration charges people forget to budget for.
The sizing spread that always works
Do not ask everyone their size and order exactly that. People guess, people change, and people leave. For a mixed UK adult team of twenty, a spread of 2 S, 5 M, 6 L, 5 XL, 2 XXL fits almost every real workforce we have shipped to. If your team skews male and manual, shift one M into XL. If it skews female and office-based, shift one L into S.
Order the spread, then let people swap between themselves on day one. It works better than a spreadsheet of stated sizes, every time.
When you should buy fewer than we quote
Here is the part a catalogue supplier will not put in writing. If your logo is changing in the next six months, if you are trialling a new uniform colour, or if you have hired three people this quarter and expect to hire three more, order the minimum and nothing extra. Twenty pieces you will definitely wear beats sixty pieces at a better unit price that become obsolete. We would rather run a second batch for you in November than sell you stock that ages in a stockroom.
The same applies to premium garments. If the shirts are for a two-day exhibition and will never be worn again, a 180gsm tee does the job and a 220gsm combed-cotton one does not do it better.
Plan the reorder before you place the first order
Two things make a top-up run painless: keeping the artwork on file at production resolution, and noting the exact garment colour code and the embroidery thread numbers. We keep both, which is why a repeat order six months later matches rather than nearly matches. If you are ordering from a supplier who cannot tell you the thread numbers they used, assume batch two will look slightly different.
Also worth knowing: garment ranges get discontinued. Colours in particular. If a shirt is core to how your team looks, ordering three per person now is cheaper insurance than hunting a discontinued shade in eighteen months.
Get the number right before you spend
If you tell us your headcount, how often the kit gets worn and what the team actually does all day, we will tell you the number we would order — even when that number is smaller than the one you asked us to quote. Send your logo through the free mock-up form and you will see it on the real garment, in your colours, before any money changes hands. If you would rather talk quantities and lead times first, request a quote and we will come back with the arithmetic written out.
