We have no minimum order. One shirt is a real order, and we will brand it. That is unusual in South African wholesale apparel, where a hundred units is a common floor and fifty is considered generous, so it is worth explaining what it means in practice — and being straight about the parts of the cost that genuinely do not scale down.
What does "no minimum" actually mean here?
It means exactly what it says. You can order:
- A single blank garment
- A single branded garment
- One of each size, to check the fit before a bulk run
- Three shirts for a small business, not three hundred
There is no minimum order quantity in our terms, no small-run surcharge, and nobody will phone you back to ask whether you meant 10 or 100.
Why would a wholesaler do that?
Two reasons, and neither of them is charity.
The first is that the stock is already in the building. We import blanks, hold them in Durban and ship nationally. The hard part of wholesale economics — committing to a container, carrying the stock, tying up the money — has already happened by the time you place an order. Selling you one shirt out of a box of twenty costs us very little that selling you the whole box does not.
The second is that small orders are how big ones start. A business that orders three branded shirts to see whether the quality is there is a business that orders eighty in March. Refusing the three is a reliable way never to see the eighty.
What does change when you order small?
This is the honest part, and anyone telling you nothing changes is selling you something.
Per-unit price. Blank garments get cheaper per unit as quantity rises. That is real, and it is not a trick — it reflects picking, packing and handling that cost much the same whether a box leaves with one shirt in it or twenty.
Setup on embroidery. Digitising a logo into a stitch file is a once-off charge per logo. On a single shirt it is the largest part of what you pay; on eighty it disappears into the per-unit cost. Worth knowing: we keep the stitch file, so the setup is genuinely once. Order one shirt today and eighty next year, and the eighty carry no setup at all.
Delivery. Couriering one shirt across the country costs roughly what couriering ten does.
None of that is a reason not to order one. It is the reason one shirt is not a fiftieth of the price of fifty.
Who actually orders small?
| Who | What they order |
|---|---|
| A business checking us out | One or two branded shirts before committing to staff kit |
| Someone sizing a team | One of each size, to pass round the office before the real order |
| A new clothing brand | A handful of garments to photograph and test the market with |
| A team that has grown | Three more shirts, because two people started in July |
That last one matters more than it sounds. Most minimum-order policies quietly punish you for hiring. If your uniform supplier needs fifty units to run again, three new starters is a problem. Here it is just an order.
Can I get one branded shirt as a sample?
Yes, and we would rather you did than guess. A single branded garment goes through exactly the same process as a run of five hundred — same artwork approval, same mock-up, same machine, same person running it. What you get back is what the bulk order will look like, not an approximation of it.
Nothing is printed or stitched until you have seen a mock-up and approved it in writing, whether the order is for one shirt or a thousand.
Does small mean slow?
No. We dispatch within 48 hours of order confirmation, or within 48 hours of mock-up approval on branded orders, and that applies to a single shirt as much as to a pallet.
Small orders sometimes move faster, simply because they do not have to wait for a gap in the schedule big enough to take them.
What about bringing your own garments?
Also fine, also no minimum. Plenty of customers arrive with garments or caps they have sourced themselves and want decorated. We embroider caps, even though we do not currently stock them. One cap is an order.
The constraint on that work is never quantity, it is whether the artwork suits the method — and we will tell you upfront when it does not.
How to order one
Exactly the way you would order five hundred. Tell us the garment, the colour, the size and what you want on it, and send through your artwork. A written quote usually goes back the same day.
Start with our garments for printing, or go straight to the quote page. If you are not sure which garment suits what you have in mind, say so — that is a normal question, and we would rather answer it before you order than after.