Custom jackets

The two styles answer different questions. A softshell is the everyday work jacket: a bonded outer face that turns wind and light rain, a brushed or fleece-backed interior for warmth, and enough structure that it holds its shape on a hanger and on a person. It is the right call when the jacket is genuinely functional outerwear that someone will wear four days a week.

A coach's jacket is lighter, looser, and unlined or lightly lined, with snap fastenings and a cut that reads as casual rather than technical. It is the better choice for a team, a school program, or an event where the jacket is as much an identity piece as a warm layer, and it costs meaningfully less per piece, which matters when you are outfitting a whole squad rather than a leadership team.

If you are ordering for a mixed group, it is usually cleaner to pick one style for everyone than to split the run. A single style keeps the program looking coherent in photographs and keeps the per-piece price on one volume break instead of two smaller ones.

Embroidery is the default and it is not a close call. Stitched thread on a jacket face survives weather, abrasion, and years of washing in a way no applied graphic does, and it reads as the quality the garment is meant to signal. A left-chest logo is the standard placement; a larger back mark works well on coach's jackets and on crew outerwear where the jacket needs to identify someone from a distance.

Heat transfer and DTF are available and they are the honest answer for artwork embroidery cannot do well: a photographic image, a fine gradient, or a large multi-colour graphic that would become a stiff, heavy embroidered panel. On a technical softshell face they need care, because the bonded membrane limits how much heat can be applied, and we will tell you up front if your artwork and your chosen blank are a bad pairing rather than finding out at production.

Whatever the method, keep the branding smaller than instinct suggests. A restrained mark is what makes a jacket something people wear on a weekend, and a jacket worn on a weekend is the only kind that earns back what it cost.

Jackets sit at the premium end of an apparel budget, and the cost drivers are different from a tee. The blank is the dominant line rather than the decoration: a softshell shell fabric with a bonded lining simply costs more than a jersey knit, and that gap does not close much with volume. Embroidery is priced by stitch count and charged as a one-time digitizing setup plus a per-piece run charge, so a compact left-chest logo is far cheaper across a run than a large back design.

Because the blank dominates, the per-piece price falls less steeply with quantity here than it does on tees or totes. Ordering more still helps, but the bigger lever on a jacket budget is the style and the decoration size, which is worth knowing before you set a number with your finance team.

See the full cost guide for how jackets sit alongside the rest of a kit, and tell us your quantity for a free itemized quote.

For companies, a jacket is the piece of swag that signals seniority and care, which makes it a natural fit for client gifting and for the leadership tier of a company swag program. It is also the item most likely to be worn in front of a customer, so the mark on it deserves more thought than the one on an internal tee.

For crews, the jacket is working outerwear before it is branding: it needs to survive a job site and it needs a name or a role on it often enough that we build most crew orders with per-person personalization. Our custom work shirts page covers the full trades lineup, and a jacket is usually the last piece added to it.

For schools, jackets belong to coaches, athletic staff, and program leadership rather than to the student body, where a hoodie does the same job for a quarter of the cost. If you are outfitting students, look at varsity jackets instead: that is a different garment with a different purpose.

Jackets sit at the top of a layering system, and most orders that include them also include something underneath. Quarter-zips are the natural mid-layer for a client-facing team, and hoodies are the everyday alternative for a crew or a student group.

For a school or team program built around outerwear rather than a work uniform, varsity jackets are the more appropriate garment and carry their own page.