Kitting

Kitting is the labor of turning several separate SKUs into one shippable bundle — folding a tee, sliding it into a poly bag with a printed card, dropping in a sticker sheet and a pair of laces, then sealing the whole thing as a single unit with its own barcode. A shop typically prices this per bundle assembled, often $1-3 on top of the individual item costs, since it's hand labor that doesn't scale the way a press run does.

Corporate welcome kits are the clearest example: a new-hire box with a quarter-zip, a branded notebook, a sticker sheet, and a card all needs kitting before it ships as one thing to one address, instead of arriving as four separate packages. We've assembled onboarding kits where the tee was the cheapest line item in the box and the labor to fold, bag, and pack the other three pieces cost more than the shirt itself.

Get a per-kit quote separate from per-garment pricing, and specify assembly order if it matters — a folded tee under a notebook crushes differently than one packed on top. Ask about minimums; the labor rarely pencils out below a few dozen units.

The mistake: treating kitting as a free add-on because "it's just packing." It's a distinct labor line item, and a quote that mentions a garment price with no assembly fee attached almost certainly isn't including it.