Resources · Uniform Management
A rollout is the one part of a uniform program you cannot quietly redo. Almost everything that goes wrong on the day was decided, or left undecided, weeks before anyone puts a garment on.
1,000+
Healthcare organisations
60,000+
Garments supplied
40+
Years experience
95%+
Client reorder rate
Why this one is different
A wrong size, a missed reorder, an inconsistent replacement — all of those are recoverable, quietly, one person at a time. A rollout is not. Everybody changes on the same day, in front of each other and in front of patients, and whatever is missing is missing in public.
That changes what is worth worrying about. The garments are rarely the problem; they were chosen carefully and nobody rolls out a range they have not seen. What causes trouble is sequence — the things that had to happen in a particular order, where one of them was left until the step that depended on it had already started.
So the work is not choosing the garments. It is deciding what has to be settled before anything else can start.
You get one attempt, and everybody watches it.
The sequence
Not a list of tasks — an order of operations. Most of these are obvious in isolation; the ones that cause trouble are the ones with something waiting on them, and wherever that applies the step it waits on is named in the column alongside.
Confirm which roles are changing, and which are not
Agree who signs off the range, and who signs off the budget
Decide whether the old uniform stops on the day or overlaps
Pick the changeover date, avoiding your busiest period
Everything below is scheduled backwards from this. Choose it before anything else is ordered.
Write down what each role wears, in full
Confirm sizes for every person, not a sample of them
Production waits on this. It is the single most common thing left too late.
Settle the allocation each person receives at changeover
Approve the embroidery setup
Nothing goes into production until this is approved, so it blocks the whole order.
Check the order against the record, role by role
Confirm the delivery site, or sites, and who receives them
Decide how garments get from the delivery point to the person
Frequently forgotten on multi-site rollouts, and it is the step that runs out of time.
Sort and label by person, not by size
Tell staff what changes, when, and what to do with the old uniform
Identify who is on leave and how they will be covered
Have a plan for the people whose garments are not right
There will be some. Deciding in advance stops it becoming the story of the day.
Hand out against a list, and mark off as you go
Deal with exceptions on the spot rather than logging them
Collect or retire the old uniform as agreed
Record the final sizes against each person
Confirm what a new starter now receives
Note anything that did not fit or did not suit the role
On the day
Changeover goes wrong in one predictable way: garments are sorted by size rather than by person, and the morning becomes a queue of people trying to find themselves in a stack. Sorting by name the day before turns the same task into handing over a labelled bundle.
The exceptions
In any rollout of reasonable size there will be a few — a size that reads differently in the new cut, someone whose role changed since sizing, an order line that went astray.
Have an answer ready — the old uniform until a replacement arrives, a small buffer of common sizes, or first place in the next order. Any of those works. Having no answer is what turns a good rollout into a bad one in front of the whole team.
Nobody remembers the ninety people it worked for.
They remember the ones it didn’t.
After the day
A rollout is the best sizing information your organisation will ever have, and most of it is lost within a fortnight because nobody wrote it down while it was still in front of them.
A few days later the new range should be unremarkable. That is what a rollout is for.
Record the sizes each person actually ended up in, note anything that did not work, and confirm what a new starter in each role now receives. It takes an afternoon while the information is still fresh, and it is the difference between a program that runs itself afterwards and one that needs the same effort all over again.
The point of a rollout is that you should not need another one.
Where we come in
Tell us the changeover you have in mind, how many people it covers and how many sites. We can help you work out what has to be settled first, and what is waiting on it.
It depends on how many people are changing, how many sites are involved and whether branding is part of it. Rather than working to a general number, work backwards: the changeover date is fixed, sizing has to be complete before the order, and where garments are decorated the setup has to be approved before anything goes into production. Tell us the date you have in mind and we can tell you what that means for the steps in front of it.
Both are workable and the trade-off is visibility. Changing everybody at once is cleaner to explain and shorter to live through, but leaves no room to learn. Staging by site or by role is more forgiving, but you spend a period with two uniforms in the building, which needs explaining to staff and to patients. Whichever you choose, decide it early — it changes how you sequence everything else.
Decide it before the day rather than after, because it is the question staff will ask first. The main choices are a hard stop, a short overlap, or retiring the old garments as they wear out. A hard stop is the only one that gives you a clean changeover; the others are easier on people but leave two uniforms in circulation for a while.
Size them with everybody else and set their bundle aside labelled with their name. The failure mode is leaving them out of the sizing entirely, because then they return to a team in a new uniform and start their own small rollout from scratch.
Assume a few will not, and decide in advance who makes the call on the day rather than what the options are. Whoever is running the changeover needs the authority to put someone back in the old uniform, or into a buffer size, without finding an approver first. The damage is never the garment — it is the twenty minutes spent deciding in front of a queue.
Everybody. Estimating across a team is where rollouts generate their exceptions, and exceptions on changeover day are far more expensive in goodwill than the time sizing would have taken. For a team of any size a fit kit is usually the practical way to do it, because staff choose for themselves rather than being guessed at.
One named person, with the authority to make small decisions without escalating. Rollouts generate a steady stream of minor calls — a size query, a role that was missed, someone starting next week — and they only become delays when each one has to find someone to approve it.
Yes. Tell us the changeover date you are working to, how many people and sites it covers, and whether branding is involved. Most of what we do at that point is tell you which decisions are already late.
Avery is cut for a contemporary, slightly tapered fit that flatters without restricting movement. Prefer a relaxed fit or planning to layer? Size up.
| Model — Women's | 5'7", wearing size S |
| Model — Men's | 6'1", wearing size L |
| Fit | True to size, tapered body |
| Length | Hip-length, V-neckline |
| Chest (CM) | Body Length | Sleeve | |
|---|---|---|---|
| XXS | 81–86 | 58 | 30.5 |
| XS | 86–91 | 60 | 31.5 |
| S | 91–97 | 62 | 32.5 |
| M | 97–102 | 64 | 33.5 |
| L | 102–107 | 66 | 34.5 |
| XL | 107–114 | 68 | 35.5 |
| 2XL | 114–122 | 70 | 36.5 |
| 3XL | 122–132 | 72 | 37.5 |
| 4XL | 132–142 | 74 | 38.5 |
