Spiritwear: Keep It Simple
Spiritwear helps build enthusiasm and a sense of community, but too many choices can undermine your sale.
Taking Orders
There’s a debate over whether it’s better to take orders from samples or to prepay for a certain number of shirts in a variety of sizes and colors and hope to sell them all.
Lee Longo, PTO president at Frank T. Wheeler Elementary School in Plainville, Conn., says her group learned its lesson about prepaid orders the hard way. The group bought sweatshirts from a vendor just before Christmas and hoped the school community would buy them as gifts. The solid navy blue sweatshirt featured the school’s name on one side.
“We actually only sold 10 percent and were stuck setting up a table at each event to sell more and finally raffled off the rest of them,” says Longo. She surmises the plain design detracted from sales. But her advice on ordering is “always take orders and payment up front.”
Whitcomb of Blackhawk Elementary agrees that pre-ordering is the safest way to go, especially if you change the designs frequently. “That way you’re not stuck with a lot of shirts you can’t sell. And a new design every couple of years just encourages people to buy a new one,” she says.
Here at Custom Sportswear, we put together a Spiritwear program for you, including order forms, posters, sample tee and online store so you can promote and collect pre-orders as opposed to having to order and pay for everything upfront. On the backend of our program, we’ll tally all orders, print the products, and then individually fold and bag each order and further organize them by grade, classroom & student so they are ready for easy, organized distribution. Check out our Program Overview page for additional details on what’s included with our program. I would also encourage you to check out our google reviews & testimonials to see what our customers (people just like yourself) are saying. We think you’ll see a few common themes throughout the reviews; “easy, organized, great quality products, amazing customer service”.
