When it comes to our fashion purchases, we have two main options—retail and wholesale shopping. Shopping in the mall is an activity we all participate in from time to time, and let’s face it, it’s fun to try on the clothes you buy and search for the exact item you want all by yourself.
But retail shopping doesn’t have an advantage where it matters perhaps the most to the majority of people, and that’s on price. By their very nature, wholesale garments offer greater flexibility for manufacturers to make a significant profit, so prices for the shopper can be significantly lower as long as the clothes are purchased in bulk.
A Small Explanation
But exactly why is this happening? Well, it’s simply a matter of numbers. The economy of scale tells us that a manufacturer’s profit surges as the output of a particular product increases. In the case of brands that deal with clothing manufacturing, the more items of a specific type of garment are produced, the cheaper the whole production process will be for the company.
It is, therefore, more cost-effective for the brand to sell a hundred items to one buyer rather than one product to ten different shoppers. Purchasing products in bulk will attract more significant discounts and, in most cases, free delivery to the customer’s location. Retail shopping, however, does not often deal with bulk quantities, so the price per item will usually be somewhat higher.
What Are the Main Clothing Items That Can Be Bought in Bulk?
There is no limit to the products that can be bought in bulk, some types of garments are more commonly found in larger quantities, like wholesale t-shirts, hoodies, sweatpants, or sweatshirts. However, in reality, you can theoretically buy any item in bulk. The wholesale sector is characterized by simple garments that can be produced on a large scale, offering the buyer huge economic advantages.
It makes sense. After all, you can’t produce custom or intricately designed clothes that can also be built on a large scale and at a competitive price. A wide range of clothing ultimately characterizes the wholesale industry, but they all have some elements in common. What exactly are they, and why are they important to buyers?
The Scarcity of Personalization
Go to any kind of website that deals with bulk clothing distribution, and you will notice an immediate difference from the clothes you find in the retail environment—the lack of writing on them. And if you think about it, it makes sense. Wholesale garments are built and designed to be purchased in large quantities, and personalized messages could limit their access to a specific audience. Let’s say you want to market a t-shirt that has a quirky message written on it. It will probably be successful among a slightly younger demographic, but an older person wouldn’t want to wear it. So right off the bat, you’ve lost a potential customer category.
However, if the clothes sold were blanks, then they could be customized later by the buyers to suit their needs, all at a slightly lower price. This is a common practice, for example, among retailers who want to buy garments at an acceptable price and then sell them at a premium once they have customized the clothes with whatever logos or designs they want. This is a reality of the wholesale sector. Many of the clothes you see in the stores come from a dozen or so makers who have sold them to other brands as wholesale transactions.
The Fabrics Being Used
It is perhaps understandable, but the clothes we find in the wholesale environment cannot come from expensive fabrics that can only be produced in limited quantities, such as cashmere or silk. Most of the clothes we find in the wholesale world are either made from natural fabrics like cotton or synthetic materials such as polyester or nylon. In many cases, we can also find a combination of the two. Or we can even find three or more types of fabrics in the same garment, as in the case of tri-blend clothing.
Of course, different processes can be implemented to give some premium characteristics to the garments, such as using the ring-spun method in the case of organic cotton-based apparel. But, as a general rule, wholesale clothing implements a similar fabric selection regardless of the brand selected. This doesn’t mean that the quality of the items is inferior. On the contrary, the fact that there is no middleman in the process of buying wholesale items guarantying that those clothes came off the production line without any problems.
Competitive Pricing
This is ultimately the main advantage of wholesale apparel over its retail counterparts. You’ll get cheaper per unit prices when you buy bulk t-shirts, sweatshirts, sweatpants, or bulk hoodies than if you bought them in a retail environment. Suppose you are, for example, a person who needs a hundred t-shirts in order to open your own screen-printing shop. In that case, you are more likely to be interested in buying these garments in bulk from a wholesale distribution outlet rather than buying them from a retail store at a higher price. But what kind of garments would you want to buy in bulk?
Wholesale Shirts
When we talk about the world of wholesale apparel, perhaps the most common clothing products brought up are wholesale shirts. And rightly so, given their flexibility and considering the benefits they can bring to your business. It’s also probably time to finally address the elephant in the room. Yes, bulk t-shirts are primarily aimed at companies that need a large number of garments at the lowest feasible prices. And the reasons for this might be as diverse as the wholesale market.
A company could rebrand and customize wholesale goods for future re-selling at a profit, use them as custom-branded uniforms in internal or external activities, or even utilize them in advertising campaigns. This does not mean that casual users cannot buy clothes wholesale. On the contrary, as they might get the most considerable advantages out of a wholesale transaction, but as a general rule, the more products you buy, the more significant the financial incentives, and most people do not buy more than ten to fifteen products at a time in just one order.
Why Blank Apparel?
Because t-shirts have become a clothing accessory that can be found and worn in a plethora of circumstances. It is perhaps the most accessible garment to customize on your own, and a multitude of wholesale suppliers produce them at a wide range of prices in various materials, colors, and sizes available. And blank t shirts successfully combine the boundaries between practicality and elegance, being cheap to produce and offering the possibility of later customization on your own if desired. And speaking of later customization, most of the t-shirts you see with personalized messages in department stores started life as blank apparel in the warehouses of wholesale manufacturers.
Wholesale Hoodies
The second most common clothing accessory in the wholesale environment consists of wholesale hoodies. The reasons are apparent. As with t-shirts, hoodies are now icons of the 21st-century fashion world, and there are countless types of outfits to match with them, with the possibilities for further customization being almost endless. Bulk hoodies can be a solution for small custom printing businesses that want to diversify their catalog and provide something different from t-shirts.
Wholesale Sweatshirts
Another category of garments that can be found in the wholesale industry is that of wholesale sweatshirts. What is a sweatshirt, if not a hoodie without a hood? And given the similarity between the two kinds of apparel, we can implicitly deduce why sweatshirts can be a perfect product to be purchased wholesale. Sweatshirts are clothing accessories that can be worn from the emergence of autumn to the very end of spring, and the materials and styles in which they can be acquired are diverse and impressive.
Wholesale Sweatpants
The last range of items we will discuss in this short article, sweatpants, can be a perfect category of products to buy in bulk when looking at their prevalence in today’s society. Ideal for going out with friends, watching a game in a stadium, or sitting on the couch when browsing through our feed, sweatpants have become iconic to the 21st-century fashion world, and today everyone has at least a pair or two in their closet. Initially created for sporting activities, their fantastic combination of polyester and cotton made them a surprisingly comfortable clothing accessory, and their use soon proved to be no longer limited to activities requiring physical effort.
Is the Wholesale Industry Also Available to Home Users?
Yes, of course. We mentioned previously that much of the wholesale industry caters to resellers and small business owners who need an ample supply of clothing for specific purposes. But that doesn’t mean wholesalers can’t also cater to the homeowner. In fact, in many ways, these are the very customers who stand to gain the most from buying garments in large quantities.
A business with considerable revenue might not feel much difference between a freight charge being included versus one that is separate. But, you, a man who knows the value of every dollar, see the importance of money saved where feasible. Clothes in the wholesale environment can be of exceptional quality, and the designs found can be matched with many outfits, so every cent saved today has the potential to be used at a later date for your subsequent purchases.
It may be a good idea, for example, to order twenty shirts at once because you most likely want to have some duplicates for when your clothes are in the laundry. At the same time, by buying more clothes at once, you can rest assured that you will have enough garments to avoid repeating the shopping process for a while. And you can also save a considerable amount of money on shipping, which will most likely be free. It’s a win-win situation. Yet surprisingly, studies say that your perception of the fashion world and how you shop may differ depending on a number of factors. Remember, what’s important to one person might be irrelevant to another.
The Importance of Making the Right Choice
The global wholesale industry has grown significantly, and people have become aware of this. The clothes we can find today directly from manufacturers are of the highest quality, being produced by more and more national and international brands at a wide range of prices, and have some distinct advantages over what we can find in department stores. We live in exciting times, and every penny saved can be significant, so buying clothes wholesale has become more critical than ever.
We are also experiencing a time when fashion individuality is at an all-time high, and trends favor wearing and matching blank clothing in ways that bring out our personality. We’re getting busier and busier with our complicated lives, and clothes shopping is something we can’t give the priority we’d like. Buying clothes in bulk can allow us to complete our wardrobe in one go and eliminate the stress of constantly having to keep up with the latest trends in the fashion industry.
