Chris Gaunt explains how and why his company, Select Uniforms, is branching out into contract embroidery and print
Chris Gaunt wants to be the invisible man. After 28 years providing garment decoration services directly to employers and tradespeople, his business Select Uniforms in Leeds has this year branched out with a new contract embroidery service. Now, it is working behind the scenes carrying out embroidery and transfer printing on jobs both tiny and massive for printers and other garment decorators. For Chris, the objective is to ensure that people buying from Select Uniforms’ contract customers have no idea that Select Uniforms exists. “Our customers can drop-ship to us from their supplier, we apply the logo, and we ship it out under a plain cover with their delivery note to their customer. If they want, they need never see the garment. It has to be seamless for our customers. We are absolutely invisible.”
The introduction of the contract side of the business builds on the company’s organic growth since it was founded by Chris’s dad, John Gaunt, in 1997, to specialise in supplying bus and coach company uniforms. For some years, it operated with just one four-head ZSK embroidery machine but, after Chris joined in 2005 and took over the helm from John a year later, production started to grow – initially with a second machine as a fallback in case the other machine developed a problem.
A Barudan fan
By the start of this year, Select Uniforms had three embroidery machines at its production hub in a small industrial complex in Stanningley on the western outskirts of Leeds. With 700 regular direct customers alongside the one-off orders, it customises uniforms on three six-heads – two Barudans and one Happy (which were bought second-hand several years ago as replacements for the original two machines). After 20 years at the business, Chris has become a particular fan of Barudan. “They are so reliable. They need so little maintenance. They can handle anything.” His team also prefers to use Madeira threads because of their quality.
As the company’s name suggests, Select Uniforms still mainly handles workwear, supplying businesses of all sizes, although it can provide any kind of branded clothing. To support regular customers, it introduced online ordering portals in 2008, with password-protected logins, pre-saved artwork and pre-selected styles. These are now used by “several hundred” customers who can draw on reporting data such as orders by department, depot or individual to help them manage and monitor budgets. Due to its location, Select Uniforms mostly supplies across Yorkshire but it serves direct customers throughout the UK.
Showroom appeal
As well as e-commerce ordering and customisation via its website, for the past 10 years Select Uniforms has had a showroom in Rawdon on the edge of Leeds where busy roads connect to Leeds city centre, Bradford and North Yorkshire. It is more of a destination than a place for passing trade where, according to James Holliday who runs the showroom and deals with orders and enquiries, customers come to “touch and feel” garments before placing an order. “Especially when they’re buying for a big team, they want to be able to actually look at what they’re buying rather than just look at a picture on a website.”
As on the website, Select Uniforms puts garments into its own categories rather than using wholesaler brand names that mean little to their direct customers. So, for simple, lower-cost garments in plain colours, there is the ‘Base’ range, while ‘Elevate’ is for better-quality, two-tone items, and ‘Summit’ is the top-quality range where a shirt might cost £50. “It helps customers work out where they want to sit in terms of budget,” Chris explains. “We can show them polos from £9 to £50 and talk them through the differences and explain why embroidery or print would be better on different styles.”
Select Uniforms’ showroom on the outskirts of Leeds
Inside the Select Uniforms showroom
The showroom presents styles in three categories – Base, Elevate and Summit
A structured approach
The direct side of the business continues to grow steadily, and Chris hopes to build on this by opening a second showroom in North Yorkshire to tap further into affluent markets around York and Harrogate. But, right now, his focus is on developing the contract arm which in its first five months since June 2025 has built up 40 regular customers. Like many garment decorators, Select Uniforms had in the past occasionally helped out other companies that needed assistance with embroidery, but Chris realised there might be an opportunity to dive in with a more structured approach. “We wanted to buy some more machines for own direct production, but we decided we needed to offer it out to make it worthwhile.”
The company bought three more embroidery machines – an eight-head Barudan and two SWF six-head machines. Again, they were second hand. “We always buy used machines because, if they’ve been well looked after, I think they’re better value,” Chris explains. To support this investment, three more staff were taken on, boosting the total permanent staff to 10, including Anna Szczepańska, who heads production after joining 12 years ago, and her deputy, Maggie Kurzawa who has been there 10 years. The company has also built up a pool of trained casual staff, such as students, who can come in when needed. They are sometimes also joined by Ecco, Chris’s black labrador.
Chris spoke to a lot of companies to identify what was needed in outsourcing. “We decided to position ourselves to respond to the problems that people were coming to us with. Some didn’t do embroidery themselves, or they had a machine, but had problems with staff, or they had too much work for the amount of machines they had, but didn’t want to invest in more. Some just want to use us as fallback in an emergency – someone they know they can ring up when they need help, when staff don’t come in.” It has been particularly compelling for printers with no embroidery equipment, adds Chris. “We have print customers who can now offer embroidery as part of their services and still make a decent margin,” he explains.
The Select Uniforms cap challenge
Chris was surprised to find that caps were a particular challenge for contract work. “There were people who couldn’t do caps themselves and told us they couldn’t find anyone they could outsource caps to: it was too much of a nightmare, like having to change all the frames on the machines. Being able to do caps was a way that we got a lot of our first few customers.”
As in the direct side of the business, there is no minimum order quantity for any kind of garment. “We want people to give us all their embroidery so we’ll take on the smaller bits. If we want to do everything, we have to accommodate all of it.”
Chris also identified a need to establish consistent channels of communication for contract work. “Another problem we wanted to respond to was people saying they were using somebody for outsourcing, but when they had a lot of work on, they couldn’t get hold of them, so I decided we needed to be accessible and on top of our communication. Even if we are full at the moment, we can build in more capacity down the line because we can tweak the timings of when staff are working.”
Account managers
One of the biggest challenges was ensuring every garment was decorated and despatched to the exacting requirements of every contract customer. “When we first started, we didn’t realise how everybody has their own particular ways of how they like to work – like what they want to go in the box or other finishing touches. It can be a challenge to understand how 40 different customers have little variations in how they do stuff, what they are really keen on. We tackle that by allocating a member of the team to be each contract customer’s account manager.” These details are kept on file as part of the company’s customer communications, which is currently run off the cloud-based Slack platform while Chris develops a bespoke system. Thanks to AI coding platform Replit, he has already been able to create a whole new production planning system himself.
DTF printing is outsourced with the designs applied in-house
Transfer printing is another option for both direct and contract customers
Customised contract work
Marketing solely through email and social media, the contract work has brought an even greater geographical spread for the company, including customers in Northern Ireland and Scotland. It also means that Select Uniforms is now “invisibly” doing work in sectors where it was not previously active, such as schoolwear and promotional clothing. While the bulk of business is printers and other garment decorators, Chris is seeing a growing number of customers who are “literally just people behind a desk”, operating purely online with no production equipment themselves. However, he has no plans to take Select Uniforms into the on-demand sphere. “Some people have wanted us to be a fulfilment centre, which isn’t something we want to do.” The company’s next step is to start offering contract customers the option of having packaging that is customised with their own branding.
Chris appreciates there could be a question over an existing garment decorator despatching work to another company’s customers. “There is a trust issue when you’re sending your customer’s logo to another company who could be a competitor, but it’s way more important to me to keep my contract customers and to keep them happy – and I can get all that work by dealing with only one company. They know they can trust us. The day we went after a contract customer’s customer would be the day we’d be finished as word would soon get out. I’ve no interest in doing that whatsoever.”
For the past three years, Select Uniforms has offered direct-to-film (DTF). Printing onto the film is outsourced, but the printed film is applied in-house using a range of heat presses, including a cap press. “We did contemplate getting our own DTF machine, but we don’t have space at the moment,” Chris adds. It is now providing DTF to contract customers too. “We are very open and transparent that, while we do all the embroidery in-house, we outsource the DTF and do only the application in-house.”
The company uses two Barudans and one Happy machine for its direct customers
Select Uniforms is developing the contract arm of its business
Further investment at Select Uniforms
As both sides of the business continue to grow, Chris expects to buy another eight-head Barudan in 2026 – new or used. He doesn’t regard a single-head machine as a worthwile investment. “When one of the six-heads is not being used for a big job, we will use it for the smaller orders, whereas with a single-head you are restricted to doing only small jobs.”
A more pressing issue is space. The production hub, where Select Uniforms has been for 10 years, has little room left for further expansion, so Chris suspects the company may eventually need to move to another unit within the Stanningley industrial complex. For now, more space is being created by reducing held stock, including boxes of bespoke garments that Select Uniforms previously had made to order in China until Covid came along.
Growing demand is also being accommodated by moving to more shifts, with the aim that Select Uniforms will operate 24 hours a day, six days a week by spring. At present, staggered shifts Monday to Saturday already mean some staff start as early as 6am while others work till 10pm. The plan is to add a night shift in early 2026, which would start at 10pm on Sundays.
Chris says that he and the team are excited to get going. “The machines can run all day and all night if needed. We’re ready to do it as soon as the next big order comes in.”
Visit the Select Uniforms website
