More Small Business Owners Are Quitting Bulk Uniform Orders for Good

Small business owners across the country are increasingly skipping bulk uniform orders altogether, choosing to outfit a team of two or twenty at the exact same per piece price.

The shift is showing up in how custom apparel companies price their work nationwide. For decades, getting a logo embroidered or printed on a shirt meant committing to a minimum run, often two dozen, four dozen or a hundred pieces, before a decorator would even start the job. That threshold quietly locked out the smallest US employers, the four person landscaping crew, the two doctor clinic, the retailer hiring its first part time associate.

Companies that have dropped the minimum entirely report a different kind of customer walking in the door: an owner who needs three shirts now, ten more in the fall, and no interest in warehousing a box of extras just to hit a case count.

Arklavo, a national custom apparel company founded in 2023, built its pricing around that no minimum approach from the start. An order for a single polo and an order for a hundred move through the same per piece price and the same production floor, whether the job calls for embroidery, direct to garment printing or heat press.

Founder Conor Smart said the pattern shows up constantly in the orders his team fulfills.

Most weeks we run a job for five pieces right alongside a job for five hundred. The business asking for five used to get told to come back once they needed fifty. We just do not think that way anymore.

Conor Smart, Founder of Arklavo

Why the math works now for smaller teams

Arklavo has never taken outside investment, and Smart said that self funded structure, paired with AI assisted production scheduling, is what lets a no minimum order actually pencil out. Rather than pricing around a factory's ideal batch size, the company prices around what a business needs that month.

Efficient scheduling lets us say yes to five pieces the same way we say yes to five hundred. Order size stops being the deciding factor in whether we take the job.

Conor Smart, Founder of Arklavo

The company also ships nationwide in about two days and offers free design help along with a rough quote before a customer commits to anything, removing two more steps that traditionally slowed down a first time buyer.

More than 13,000 businesses, spanning corporate offices, healthcare practices, hospitality groups, schools, sports teams and trade crews, have placed orders under that model, a range that runs from single owner operators to employers with dozens of locations. Many of those orders start in the custom business apparel lineup, where the same no minimum pricing applies whether a business needs one shirt or a hundred.