Small Batch vs Bulk Orders for Company Merchandise

Any time you're ordering company merchandise, you have a choice to make: how much do you order at once?

Obviously, the choice is sometimes made for you. If you're planning to hand out a customized tote to every employee in a company of 50,000 employees, small batches aren't going to cut it. Or, if you're a small business looking to get uniform shirts for all 23 employees, you don't need a bulk order.

But for the thousands of companies in the middle, picking between small batches or a single larger bulk order is a real decision. So, let's go through the pros and cons of both options, and see which comes out on top for you.

No Right Answer

Before we begin, it's important to recognize that there's not going to be a firm right answer at the end of this post. We're not here to tell you which one is better; we're here to help you decide which one is right for your current needs. Even that can change, from project to project, from event to event, or as your company grows.

Part of the goal of this post is to guide you through making this decision, so be prepared to think about your overall goals, your timelines, your budget, and other considerations. Sometimes, the deciding factor is something you wouldn't expect, like finding a place to store the items as you hand them out.

The Pros and Cons of Bulk Orders for Company Merchandise

When you want to order company-branded merchandise and use it throughout your internal and external marketing, there's the possibility that you'll want a lot of whatever it is you're ordering. 1,000 kits of customized pens and stationery, a few hundred branded tote bags, a broad selection of customized apparel; bulk orders allow you to have as much as you need, with some to spare.

For most merchandise production companies, a bulk order is considered to be anything over 100 units. That might mean 100 assorted t-shirts, 100 tote bags, or 100 10-packs of customized pens.

What are the benefits of bulk orders?

The Pros of Bulk Ordering

The benefits of bulk orders tend to be fairly apparent when you think about commercialism at scale.

You get a large number of consistently-produced items. You don't necessarily have to worry about color-matching across different batches, or the availability of the base item with months between orders, or changes in the production process affecting consistency. Since all of the items are produced all at once, as long as you get the initial design dialed in, it will all be right on the money.

You can take advantage of volume discounts. Economies of scale are incredibly important to modern commerce, which is why so much production is outsourced and why you can find a hundred different companies all reselling the same product from one production facility. It's simply cheaper to create one order of 10,000 items than it is to create 100 orders of 100 items, even if those items are all the same. There are setup and teardown, preparation, and other time-consuming elements of the process that are avoided when you order in bulk.

Generally speaking, bulk orders are going to save you an average of 15-30% per-item compared to multiple smaller batches of the same item. The specifics vary, of course.

The Cons of Bulk Ordering

There are always going to be downsides to any trade-off, and in the case of bulk ordering, your trade-off is gaining volume and efficiency at the cost of agility and customization.

You have limited or no ability to customize items. If you want to print off 10,000 shirts for your employees, bulk ordering makes it easy. If you want each of those items to be monogrammed with the employee's name, you'll find it nearly impossible. The benefit of bulk ordering lies in automated repeated actions, which you can't get if you want each one to be different – at least not easily.

Agility and the option to respond to changes is also limited. If you make an order for 10,000 items and decide you want to change the design or the base material or something else right before production starts – or after production has begun – you're in for a bad time. Canceling an in-progress order can be very wasteful and expensive, and changes often have a sizable turnaround time. There may even be punitive fees attached to discourage last-minute changes.

You have a greater risk of waste. If you order 1,000 items to hand out at a trade show and end up only handing out 500 of them, you have 500 items to deal with. If it's generic merchandise, fine, you can hang onto it and give it out at the next event. If it's customized for the event? Well, now what? It's easy to get your numbers wrong and end up with a lot of some item you don't have much use for, and then you're either stuck figuring out how to repurpose them or add them to the already colossal waste in the fashion industry.

The Pros and Cons of Small Batch Orders for Company Merchandise

Small batch ordering is generally defined as any order of under 100 items, though different producers may have different definitions based on their processes and their capabilities.

Of note is the different kinds of small batch producers. Some are still industrial-scale and produce in much the same way, just fewer of any given item at a time. Others are more hand-made or carefully, individually produced. We're generally talking about the latter here; if a huge producer is capable of just changing a number from 10,000 to 100 and running off an order, many of the same pros and cons as bulk ordering apply.

The Pros of Small Batch Ordering

With small batch production, you have a lot of opportunity for flexibility, customization, and uniqueness in your items. You can often work with producers to create something unique, rather than just relying on the limitations available in factory-scale machines.

You have a ton of flexibility and customization options. The example of monogrammed shirts for employees is squarely a small batch advantage. Since each item is likely being made at least somewhat by hand, rather than entirely through an automated process, you're able to add customizations to each one. You can also halt orders, make changes, and iterate much more easily.

Small batch production is generally much more ethical. One of the biggest downsides with bulk production is the wasteful nature of the production processes, whether it's inordinate water use, harsh chemicals used in the process, or just unnecessary off-cuts and discarded materials that might be salvaged and repurposed in a smaller-scale production. Small batch production companies often specialize in more ethical and sustainable production methods.

Small batches are great for testing. While getting one of an item for evaluating a process or design is standard for both small and bulk orders, ordering 10-20 of an item in several different designs, to test which has the best response, is an ideal use case of small batch ordering.

The Cons of Small Batch Ordering

Trade-offs, right? With small batch ordering, you're getting agility and customization, but you're losing efficiency.

Small batches don't have volume discounts. While the sum total cost is lower because of the smaller number of items, the per-item cost is likely to be higher. It's closer to what the base cost of the item is, so if you're hoping to make a profit, you would need to charge more to do it.

You aren't able to scale very effectively. Small batches are good when your needs are small. What happens, though, if you have a sudden surge in demand? Often, these small batch producers aren't able to scale very rapidly and will have caps on how much they can produce in a given time. Unexpected surges in interest or demand will be difficult to meet.

A Third Option: On-Demand Orders

Another option you might consider is setting up a set of products with an on-demand production company.

On-demand production has a higher up-front setup cost, since you need to do everything to nail down your products right away. Once it's up and running, though, you have products ready to be printed and shipped essentially at a moment's notice.

With on-demand production, you only pay for what you need, and there's never a need to store surplus because you only order to fill demand. You're also often free to change designs and items on the fly.

On-demand does tend to falter for large-scale needs, and there are often limited customization options. You also don't get any sort of volume discounts since there's no volume involved in the same way.

We're not going to focus too much on this, but know that it's a possible option to consider as well.

Which Option is Right for You?

When you're deciding between bulk ordering or small batch ordering, it's worth going through the whole process and outlining your needs.

What is your budget? If you're pinching pennies but have large-scale needs, bulk ordering is going to have a lower per-item cost and will get you what you need more efficiently in pricing, even if the sticker shock of the initial bill can be high. Conversely, if you don't have enough budget to order everything at once, small batch might be more effective.

What are your items? Some items are simply more efficiently produced at scale. Customized stationery or pencils, simple products, and basic designs work well with bulk printing, but become very inefficient and costly in comparison for small batch production. Other items can be made in small or large amounts without as much variation. Often, items that are inefficient to produce in small numbers are accompanied by minimum order amounts to avoid the worst situations.

What are your customization needs? As we've mentioned already, if you plan to have individually customized items like monogrammed uniform shirts, small batch is usually the way to go. Large production doesn't have the option to customize each individual item. That said, sometimes you can bulk order a base item and have it sent elsewhere for customization, though that obviously adds significantly to costs and timelines.

What is your timeline? Small batch production is generally the slower option, especially if your needs are at the top end of their production capabilities. Since they tend to be more bespoke productions or involve more hand-made, more customization, or more ethical (but slower) production methods, there's only so much efficiency they can use without sacrificing those benefits. Bulk ordering, meanwhile, takes time to initiate, but is quite rapid once it gets going.

Where will you handle your items? A surprising roadblock for many smaller businesses is just finding a place to store your promotional items in between fulfillment and use. While larger companies can make space in a warehouse somewhere, smaller companies might need to line hallways with boxes, take over a conference room temporarily, or rent a storage unit. More than one small company has been blindsided by the realities of storing a large number of items.

Small batch obviously has less of a problem with this, but it's less of a matter of the specific fulfillment type and more the quantity of items. The only option that alleviates this problem entirely is on-demand printing.

When you get right down to it, the specific choice depends on a lot of factors. Whether you need a lot of an item very quickly, a small number of customized items, or something somewhere in between, picking the right production strategy is just one part of the overall process.

Don't forget; different producers have different pros and cons as well. An ethically-producing small batch company can still be the best option even for a lot of items, if you can stretch out the timelines and divide the budget. It's often worth paying for the sustainability, the quality, and the support throughout the industry.

You can also find companies like ours. While we don't necessarily do truly small batches (many of our products have minimum orders around 50), we can still offer a lot of the benefits of small batch production, while also leveraging economies of scale to fulfill large orders. Feel free to reach out if you have any specific needs, as well; we're always happy to help.