Retail work pays better per order and costs far more per order to win. Wholesale accounts are the opposite: harder to open, then quiet, repeat and predictable. Ten good ones will carry a shop.
Who actually buys repeatedly
Forget "local businesses". You want organisations that reorder decorated garments as a matter of routine:
- Uniform-wearing trades. Scaffolders, landscapers, plumbers, security firms, cleaning companies. Staff turnover means reorders whether they like it or not.
- Clubs and teams. Annual cycles, several kit items, and a committee that hates the process.
- Schools, PTAs, universities. Leavers' hoodies, houses, societies, sports. Extremely seasonal, extremely repeatable.
- Promotional product resellers. They sell, you decorate. Lower margin, near-zero acquisition cost.
- Other decorators. Someone with an embroidery machine and no press needs a screen printer, and vice versa. See the contract-work angle below.
- Breweries, gyms, cafes, festivals. Merch, staff kit, and an existing reason to care what it looks like.
Have these five things ready first
- A price for their specific repeat item. Not a price list, a price. "Your polo, left chest, 25 at a time: £X each."
- An honest lead time, the one you can hold in your busiest week, not your quietest.
- A minimum you will actually enforce. See setting a minimum.
- A reorder route that takes them under a minute: a link, an account, a stored design.
- Payment terms you have decided in advance, and a credit limit.
Turning up without these is what makes a wholesale conversation drift into "send me some prices" and then silence.
What to say
The pitch that works is narrow and concrete:
"You've got eight staff in branded polos. I print for three other trades locally. I can do your polo, left chest and back, £X at 25 pieces, ten working days, and reorders take you about a minute. Want me to do a sample so you can see the quality?"
Named item, named price, named quantity, named lead time, low-commitment next step. The general version, "we do screen printing, DTG and embroidery, competitive prices, quick turnaround", says nothing they can act on.
The sample is the sales tool
A single decorated garment with their logo on it, in their hand, outperforms any brochure. Cost it as marketing spend, not as a job. For a serious prospect it is the cheapest thing you will do all week.
Contract decorating deserves a separate look
Other decorators are the fastest accounts to open because they already understand lead times, artwork and minimums. Margins are thinner, so price it as its own tier with its own minimum, no artwork hand-holding, and no customer service obligation. Many shops run 20 to 30 percent of capacity as contract work to smooth the quiet weeks.
Then keep them
Wholesale accounts are lost through drift, not disasters: a slow reorder, a missed date, a price change with no notice. What keeps them is a reorder that takes a minute and a date you hit. See building recurring revenue from schools and clubs for the seasonal version, and the customer portal as a retention tool for the mechanics.
Cost to serve, account by account
Two accounts at the same revenue can be worth very different amounts, and the difference is almost never in the price they pay. It is in what they cost to serve.
| Trait | Cheap to serve | Expensive to serve |
|---|---|---|
| Artwork | Same designs, digitised or screens exist | New art each time, supplied badly |
| Approvals | One decision maker, fast | Committee, slow, changes after approval |
| Quantities | Predictable, planned | Lumpy, urgent |
| Delivery | Scheduled, one address | Split shipments, changing addresses |
| Payment | On terms, no chasing | Late, needs statements |
Rank your accounts on that table rather than on turnover, and the ones worth pursuing more of become obvious. The expensive ones are not bad customers; they are customers whose price needs to reflect the work, which is a conversation you can only have with the cost figures in front of you.
Measure the account, not just the order
The account-level view is where wholesale relationships quietly go wrong: a rate agreed three years ago, plus a habit of absorbing artwork time, plus a couple of rushes a year, and a headline account is running below viability.
With labour clocked against jobs, the job costing report gives margin after labour by customer, which is the number that settles it. Reviewed once a quarter, it produces one of three actions per account: leave it alone, reprice the extras at the next reorder, or stop chasing more of that work. All three are reasonable. Not knowing is not.
Make the second order automatic
The first order is sales. Every order after it is operations, and that is where accounts are won permanently.
- Save the design against the account so nobody re-proofs artwork that has not changed.
- Put their agreed rate on a price list so it applies without being remembered or renegotiated.
- Give them a portal login where the previous job is one click from being reordered, with their sizes pre-filled.
- Diarise the season. If they order in March and September, contact them in February and August rather than waiting.
- Send the invoice with the dispatch, not three days later. Slow invoicing teaches slow payment.
Contract decorating deserves its own arithmetic
Decorating for other decorators or for promotional resellers is a different business: thinner margins, larger runs, no end-customer handling and much lower cost to serve. It can be excellent work if you price the run rather than the garment, insist on print-ready files and a firm schedule, and keep it off the press during your own peak weeks. Where it goes wrong is treating it as retail work at a discount, which gives you retail cost to serve at contract prices. Decide which one you are selling, quote accordingly, and check the margin per shop hour after the first few jobs rather than at the end of the year.
Printer's Friend gives each account its own portal login with their designs saved and one-click reorder, plus per-customer price lists so their agreed rate applies automatically rather than being remembered.