Hi Vis Workwear 101: What You Need to Know When Adding Your Logo

A logo says a lot about a business. Often, it’s a visual representation of your organization’s goals, its history and even its future. Or maybe it’s just a design that everyone thought looked awesome! Whatever your logo looks like, it’s a major part of your brand, and it’s important to have it on display while employees are on the job.

That’s a big part of why so many companies customize their hi vis workwear with custom imprinting of their logo or other text. Custom imprinted workwear has many benefits, but, to capture those, it’s important to understand the imprinting process and how best to make it work for you. Today, we’re going to talk about how HiVis Supply creates custom safety work clothes that look fantastic and keep workers safe and seen. We’ll also tell you the key information you need to know when creating customized workwear through HiVis Supply, including all of the must-know considerations for the size and placement of your logo to maintain ANSI compliance. 

Logo Imprinting Services at a Glance

With HiVis Supply’s imprinting services, you can add your organization’s logo and other printed text to almost any of our high visibility workwear pieces. We use a high-quality printing process to customize jackets, vests and work shirts with logos that stand out in a crowd anywhere they go. We offer text imprinting services as well. It’s a snap to custom imprint vests or jackets with team names or even with the names of individual employees, and it makes it easy to recognize everyone. Our process is fast and easy, our images are clear and sharp and our prices are affordable!

Why Add Your Logo?

You’re probably not adding your logo to your company’s high visibility workwear just because it looks cool. Although — we’re just saying — it is going to look pretty cool. There are some real benefits to customized workwear, too. We go into more detail about why you should put your logo on your workwear elsewhere on our blog. In summary, these are some of the most common reasons that organizations choose to add their logo to hi vis workwear:

• Helps differentiate employees from other contractors. On many job sites, contractors from different companies work side by side all day. It’s much easier to tell employees of different contractors apart when they’re wearing imprinted hi vis clothing. Custom imprinted clothing helps managers and employees communicate more smoothly and keeps things orderly on the job site. 
• Creates a professional and put-together look for your employees. Image is everything in business, and matching customized workwear presents the polished and professional look that most businesses want. 
• Helps create brand awareness and recognition. Adding your logo to your workwear is great advertising. When your workwear shows off your brand, it helps create brand awareness in other contractors, project owners or even just passers-by. Through the phenomenon known as mere exposure, you can send subconscious signals that help people perceive your brand more favorably.
• Makes employees feel like part of a team. Wearing a vest imprinted with the organization’s logo or name helps remind employees that they’re essential parts of the team. This can help improve team bonding and cohesion, and it can also help workers remember that they’re representing not just themselves but the whole organization.

Adding Imprinting to Hi Vis Workwear in 6 Steps

HiVis Supply makes it amazingly easy to add a custom logo or other imprinting to your workwear. Here’s the basic process that our customers use to get the best custom hi vis workwear at the best price:

1. Contact HiVis Supply and request a custom workwear quote. To help us get your quote quickly, be sure to enter the part number of the item you want imprinted and send us a vector graphics file of your logo in either .ai or .eps format. 
2. Our representatives will call you to provide a quote, answer any questions, and offer personal assistance with your order. 
3. We’ll create a design proof showing how your logo will look on the garment and send it to you for approval. 
4. Our team of apparel imprinting experts will create your custom workwear. We use state-of-the-art equipment and premium-grade materials to ensure that every piece comes out crisp, accurate and looking great. 
5. To make sure you get the highest quality garment, every item we customize gets a three-step quality check at each step of the process. 
6. We pack your workwear securely and ship it directly to your business. Our average production turnaround is five business days.

We design our entire process to be as user-friendly as possible. Anytime you need help, our team will be glad to answer your questions and provide assistance!

Important Considerations for Imprinting Hi Vis Workwear

In the next several sections, we’ll discuss some need-to-know information on custom imprinted hi vis workwear. These important facts will help you make the best decisions about how you want your custom workwear to look and function.

Is Your Logo Printing ANSI 107 Compliant?

It’s crucial to ensure that your logo printing doesn’t bring you out of compliance with the ANSI 107 standard. To review quickly, ANSI 107 is the standard that defines different levels of high visibility protection in workwear. ANSI 107 requires specific amounts of high visibility fluorescent and reflective material and having your logo printed too large may cover up too much material. So how big can your logo be without violating ANSI 107 standards? Look to these rules for your answer:

• The total area covered by your logo or other imprinting can’t exceed 72 square inches. You’re allowed to split up those 72 square inches however you’d like, such as putting one logo on the back of a vest and another on its front pocket, but 72 inches of total coverage is the maximum you’re allowed under ANSI 107. ANSI 107 7.2 has the full details if you’ve got more questions.
• Section 7.2 also requires that your logo and lettering don’t leave gaps of more than 2 inches horizontally in the area covered by retroreflective material. Identification panels, lettering and logos of contrasting non-compliant material shall cover no more than 22 square inches of the minimum amount of visible retroreflective or combined-performance material specified. We don’t recommend printing over retroreflective material at all, and we’ll talk about why in just a minute.
• ANSI 107 6.3.5 also requires you to consider your garment’s “balance of design.” That means that both the front and the back of the garment need a certain percentage of high visibility materials present. A design with a very large logo on the back and nothing on the front still might fail the balance of design test, even if it’s under 72 square inches in size.

If your workplace only requires non-ANSI enhanced visibility clothing, you don’t need to worry about whether your logo is ANSI 107 compliant. That said, it’s still smart to be conscious of how your logo might affect your workwear’s visibility performance. 

This hi vis work jacket shows three of the most common areas for logo imprinting: the upper back, lower back and upper arm.

Choosing a Site for Logo Imprinting

Certain parts of our workwear garments are better suited to imprinting than others. Generally, you’re looking for a large, clear space that’s not too close to any important features of the garment. For best results, aim for at least 1" to 1.5" of space between your logo and any important part like reflective material, zippers, pockets or seams. 

Why is it so important to give your imprinting a little buffer space on the garment? In the case of reflective stripes, it’s a safety hazard to imprint designs on top of a garment’s reflective material. That’s because imprinted lettering doesn’t reflect light the way reflective material does, so it impedes the reflective material’s ability to do its job and keep you safe. 

It’s also important to leave enough space to ensure that your logo applies correctly to the garment. A design that’s too close to a seam or a pocket will make your logo design more difficult to apply and increase the chance of printing errors. Again, our recommendation is at least one inch of space between the logo’s edge and any seam, zipper or reflective material.

Finally, leaving a bit of extra space helps give your imprinted workwear the clean, sharp look you want. A logo that takes too much space can give the workwear design a jumbled, overly busy appearance. Give your design some room to breathe!

Popular Spots for Logo Imprinting

• Upper Back: The upper back area is a popular choice for logo imprinting because it puts your logo on display prominently and allows you to have a larger logo size. On most of our safety vests, a logo on the upper back can have a maximum width of around 11". 
• Front Pocket: The front pocket is a safe location choice that we always recommend. It’s big enough to show some detail on your logo but small enough not to run afoul of ANSI 107. A front pocket is also a highly prominent location, so you’ll be sure to get the most publicity out of your logo placement. 
• Lower Back: The lower back is a popular choice for adding imprinting other than a logo. Some organizations print department names here to help keep employees’ job functions clear. On most garments, a lower back imprint will appear beneath a horizontal reflective stripe, so an imprint design for this area will typically need to be longer than it is tall. 
• Sleeves: HiVis Supply can also imprint logo designs on the sleeves of a garment. The upper sleeve area near the shoulder is the most common area for sleeve imprinting, but we can also imprint a design on other parts of a garment’s sleeve. 

What Kind of Logo Imprinting Is Available? 

It’s also easy to customize the style and look of your imprinted logo and lettering. HiVis Supply offers three different imprinting options:

• Black: Classic black imprinting is a simple choice with a bold impact. A solid black imprint provides a great contrast to the high visibility colors; helping it to really stand out.
• Full Color: If your company colors are important to you, then they are important to us too. With full color imprinting, our imprinting team can help make sure your company brand looks its best on your high visibility workwear. 
• Reflective: For an extra boost to your workwear’s reflective power, use our reflective logo imprinting. This option is especially good for companies with employees who often work in low light conditions. 

Easy Logo Imprinting

Looking for the absolute fastest way to get your logo imprinted on high-quality workwear? HiVis Supply’s Easy Imprinting options might be just what you’re looking for. Our Easy Imprinting collection includes some of our most popular and economical workwear items, like our ANSI Class 2 multi-pocket vest and our ANSI Class 3 thermal bomber jacket. Your Easy Imprinting order includes one custom image imprinted in black on your garment’s upper center back. 

The easy imprint options are a great fit for any organization that needs a quick turnaround on custom hi vis gear at a reasonable, all-inclusive price. Head over to our Easy Imprinting collection to see all your options and get started. 

Notes and Tips for Your Custom Hi Vis Workwear Order

Here are a few more key notes that will help make sure you get exactly what you’re looking for from your custom hi vis workwear order:

• Remember to check out all of the awesome options in our enhanced visibility collection if you don’t need ANSI 107 compliant gear. 
• Most of our safety vests and shirts have a low 20-piece minimum order; and outerwear has a 10-piece minimum order for imprinting.
• Please remember that any items we custom imprint just for you are not able to be returned or exchanged once completed.

HiVis Supply is ready to help you get started on your custom safety work clothes. Submit a quote request form today, and our imprinting professionals will start making your dream a reality! See our workwear imprinting guide for more details, as well as our full selection of Easy Imprinting workwear that makes the process even easier.