Quality Checks to Carry-out When Buying Branded Workwear

Branded workwear can have a big impact on how people perceive your business. It will often be the first thing that prospective and current customers notice when they meet one of your employees, and it’s important that you manage that perception as best you possibly can.

There are a few basic quality checks that you can carry out when buying branded workwear, to make sure that you’re putting your best foot forward and making a sustainable investment. From fabric weight to shrinkage, here’s what to check.

Fabric weight

The most basic indicator of quality and durability is fabric weight. Ask the supplier for the GSM (grams per square metre) of the garments you’re considering buying, and for a physical fabric sample so that you can see what it feels like in your hands.

Polycottons and other natural-synthetic fabric blends tend to provide the best of both worlds, as they’re both comfortable and durable enough for daily use and regular washing.

Stitching

Even if the fabric is of incredibly high quality, if the stitching isn’t up to scratch, your branded workwear won’t last long at all. Particularly in industries where your employees need to move around a lot during the workday, such as in the construction industry, poor stitching can start to unravel surprisingly quickly, leaving the affected items essentially useless.

Logos

There are a few methods that customised workwear suppliers like Screen Textiles use to apply logos to garments, with the most popular being embroidery and screen printing. In most cases, embroidery will provide the most professional-looking and durable result, but it won’t work as well as screen printing for larger designs.

No matter which option you decide to go for, make sure that you wash a test piece a few times to see how the logo will hold up. If it starts to fray or peel after just a short while, you may want to try another provider.

Colour & Sizing Consistency

Both colour and sizing variation between garments is reasonably common, both in the same batch and between batches, but it is avoidable.

Make sure that you check with your supplier how they carry out these kinds of quality controls, and if you’re particularly concerned, maybe even consider requesting some samples so you can do your own checks.

Shrinkage

Most fabrics will shrink a certain amount when they’re first washed. This is inevitable, but it needs to be done before, not after, the fabric is made into a garment.

Make sure that the fabrics you’re buying are pre-shrunk, or you’ll find that the first time your employees wash their workwear, they’ll end up with pieces that are totally the wrong size.

The whole point of quality checks is that by doing a little work early on, you can avoid potentially much bigger issues further down the line. Make sure that you carry out these checks diligently, and implement processes that mean that they can consistently be applied going forward to maintain a steady level of quality.