Minimum order quantities

A minimum order quantity is the point below which a run stops making economic sense for whoever is making it. It is not a negotiating position and it is rarely arbitrary. Understanding what sets it tells you which minimums are movable and which are physics.

What a minimum is actually made of

Every production run carries costs that do not change with quantity:

• Setup. Screens made and aligned, a print head purged and profiled, an embroidery design digitised, a die cut, a mould made.
• Changeover. The machine has to stop, be cleaned, be reconfigured and be test-run. In liquid and cosmetic formats this is the dominant cost and it is measured in hours.
• Approval. Someone makes a sample, someone checks it, someone signs it off. That is people’s time and it does not halve when the order does.
• Materials bought in units you do not control. Fabric comes on rolls, trims come in boxes, labels come in printed runs. Buying half a roll usually means paying for the roll.

Divide those by ten units and the number is absurd. Divide them by a thousand and they disappear into the noise. The minimum is roughly where that division stops being absurd.

Why the number differs so much by method

The minimum you are quoted is mostly a statement about setup cost, so it tracks the decoration method almost exactly:

Two of these are worth dwelling on.

Embroidery minimums fall after the first order. Digitising is paid once and the file is reused, so a repeat run of the same design carries almost no setup. If you expect to reorder, the first order is buying an asset, not just garments.

In CPG, packaging usually sets the floor. People assume the constraint is how little a plant will brew or blend. Frequently the real constraint is that a label or carton supplier will not print fewer than some number of units economically. When someone quotes you a minimum on a beverage or a supplement, it is worth asking which of the two numbers you are actually being given, because they move independently and only one of them is about the product inside.

How unit cost behaves as you scale

The shape is a curve that flattens, not a straight line down:

• At the minimum, setup is a large fraction of every unit.
• At two or three times the minimum, setup has largely amortised. This is usually the best value-for-risk point, and it is where most first drops should sit.
• Well beyond that, unit cost keeps falling but slowly. The savings come from material pricing tiers rather than setup, and they are small.

The practical consequence: the jump from the minimum to a modest multiple of it buys you a lot. The jump from there to a large order buys you comparatively little, while multiplying the cash you have committed and the inventory you have to sell. Most over-ordering happens because someone was quoted a unit price at a large quantity and read it as a discount rather than as a risk transfer.

Working with minimums rather than against them

Validate demand before you commit inventory. A preorder or a waitlist tells you the size of the run you should be placing. Committing capital to a guess and then discovering the guess was wrong is the single most expensive mistake available in this category.

Consolidate setups. Three designs sharing a colour palette can share screens. Several products in one production window share a changeover. Placing them as one job rather than three is often a larger saving than negotiating the unit price.

Split the decoration. A core run screen-printed for volume, plus a small digital run for variants, sizes or a late addition, is usually cheaper than forcing everything through one method.

Ask which minimum you are being quoted. Batch, packaging, fabric and decoration minimums are four different numbers. The one that binds is the highest, and it is worth knowing which it is before you try to move it.

What this means for a brief

You do not need a quantity to start a conversation, and you should be suspicious of anyone who insists on one before understanding what you are making. What genuinely changes the answer is the decoration method, the format, whether anything is custom, and how much certainty you have about demand. Those are the questions worth arriving with.