Gym towels are bought from a sample and judged after a season in the laundry. These four decisions are what decide the second part.

Colour-fastness to bleach

Issued towels are washed hot with bleach, several hundred times a year. A colour with no stated fastness will grey or shift, and because the whole stock is washed together it happens to all of it at once.

Ask for fastness to bleach in writing before you compare prices. It is the number that decides whether you are replacing stock in year two or year five.

Shrinkage across cycles, not first wash

Every towel shrinks on the first wash and most quotes stop there. What matters operationally is whether it keeps shrinking, because a towel that has lost a size stops stacking and stops looking like the rest of the stock.

Ask for shrinkage across cycles. If a supplier can only give you a first-wash figure, they are describing a retail towel.

Work out the stock level before the unit price

You need more towels than a day’s turnover, because a proportion is always in the wash. The multiple depends on your laundry cycle, not your member count.

This number is usually a bigger cost than the difference between two quotes, and it is the one nobody calculates until they run out at peak.

Match the format to the job

A member sweat towel is small, light and hooked so it dries in a bag and hangs on a machine. An issued towel is built for the laundry. Equipment towels should be a different colour and size so nobody confuses them. Retail towels are heavier with woven branding because they go home.

Buying one towel for all four jobs is how gyms end up with towels on the floor and equipment cloths in the shower.

What to send when you ask for a quote

Member numbers, laundry turnaround, which of the four formats you need, your colours and your artwork. That is enough for a real quote and a mockup the same day.

Fine detail closes up in a woven border, so most marks need simplifying. We redraw free.