We ordered tee shirts with dates on them. We were left with a box or 2 of them at the end of the year. We created a standing rule that no spirit wear can have dates printed on them.
It was to keep boards after us from making the same mistake.
Some of my board members wanted to prepurchase spirit wear this year to sell at things like back to school night and family picnic because we get requests for such things at those events. We have never done this before and would be leery about prepurchasing, but will look at the costs. The plan is to have enough in stock to sell EVERYWHERE (picnic, before the PTO meetings, in school, variety show, etc.) We do mark ours up to make a couple of dollars on each piece so we can afford then to sell it at cost and call it a "sale."
I'm glad I read this thread; it's given some valuable insight.
There's an easy way to avoid over-ordering that results in extra inventory.
SPIRIT-WEAR
offers a spritwear program that allows you to order exactly what you want. You distribute the order forms to each student and that allows each student to order any items in the color/size, etc. that they want. It's pretty simple. They do everything for you. I highly recommend them.
It seems that when you order in bulk, you'll always be trying to sell at every event you have to recover your costs. A lot of effort to get rid of sometimes a lot of inventory.
We also had extra spiritwear 1 year.... we had it priced where we had been making 1-2.00 per item. So we had a clearance sale the following year during our ice cream social-- kindergarten round-up, meet the teacher night... where ever we could-- it took about 2 years to finally get ride of it all... it wasn't that it was old--- but it was limited sizes to work with-- then we also changed our spiritwear look to get new orders as well and changed companies-- found a company that offered samples to show-- we pre-ordered only-- no overstock to worry about and made 2.00 on each item sold-- we also went out of state to have a no deliver charge on our orders.... it's been very good - this will be our third year to use the company-- our 2nd. year to use for all our spiritwear.
Don't hide anything and then you'll be trusted as not hiding anything. That is my advice. We too had a large expenditure for spirit wear and that put us in the whole to the tune of several thousand dollars. We will/can continue to sell it (there's no date on it or anything) but my first action was to call the printing company and to put them on notice that if anyone ever submitted a spirit wear order they were only to begin work after contacting me. Otherwise they would not be paid. Secondly, I took responsibility. It was on my watch-I should have had a stop gap in place for extravagant orders and I did not. My approach may not be yours but taking the hit relayed a distinct message of who was in charge and who was the bottom line.
Next we sold spriit wear EVERYWHERE. At our events, at our open houses, from the front office. We got the principal to buy off on relaxed dress Fridays if the teachers wore a "shirt" and then ran discount programs. We sold spiritwear vouchers as stocking stuffers and everything else you can think of. Don't change the design for next year and if possible just keep using. Use the overstock for Spirit Basket raffles once a week, or Bingo basket gifts. Give free tshirts to your kids that cannot afford them so they have something to wear on spirit days at school. You can do that as a show of good will and get the word out. Even if your loss means a good will story...it's something.
I believe you'll always have about 2k tied up in spirit wear but that is where you should target.
