A short, practical guide to reading a merch quote — and the four questions that tell you what you are actually buying.
Most merch quotes describe the garment in adjectives. Premium. Heavyweight. Soft-hand. Not one of those words is checkable, which is the point of using them.
Here are the four questions that turn a quote into information.
Not "premium heavyweight cotton". A brand and a number: AS Colour 5100, Stanley/Stella STSU177, Comfort Colors 1717. You can then go and read the weight, the fit and the shrinkage yourself, and you can hold two quotes next to each other.
A vendor who will not give you a style number is usually sourcing on price per order, which means the garment can change between your sample and your delivery. That is the actual risk, and it is the one nobody mentions.
Print is cheap and reads cheap. Embroidery costs more per unit and there is a one-time cost to digitise your mark into a stitch file, usually $50–$100. Ask who eats that. Ask to see the stitch file proof before the run, because a logo with fine detail will be simplified to be embroiderable and you want to be the one approving that, not finding out in a box of 200.
"Left chest" is not a placement. A placement is a width in millimetres and a distance from a named seam — 70mm wide, 200mm down from the high point of the shoulder, 60mm in from the placket. If that is not written down, it will vary between garments, and it will vary most on the ones you hand to people you are trying to impress.
If you are quoted on 200 units, you are buying 200 units. Ask what the reorder minimum is, what the storage arrangement is, and what happens when the sizes run out unevenly — because they will. Roughly 70% of crewneck demand is large; you will be sitting on the extra-smalls.
The made-to-order answer to that last question is that there are no leftovers, because nothing is made until somebody has bought it. That is the honest reason on-demand exists, and it matters more than the marketing around it.