Varsity Jacket Patches: What to Order for the 2026-27 Season

Letterman season runs from August through November, and the orders that go wrong nearly always go wrong for the same two reasons: the letters were ordered in more than one batch, or the artwork was designed at a size chenille cannot hold. Both are avoidable, and neither is obvious until the jackets are hanging together.

Order the whole set in one batch

Chenille yarn is dyed in lots. A second order placed three weeks later can come back a shade off, and on fifty jackets hanging in a row that difference is visible from across the room. If you are ordering for a squad, a class or a whole school, count once and order once. This is the single most common cause of a reorder we see, and it costs nothing to avoid.

Design to the limits chenille actually holds

Chenille is looped pile yarn, roughly three times thicker than embroidery thread, and that thickness sets every limit. A standalone letter needs at least 2 inches of height and 3 inches or more is where it starts to look right. Text inside a patch needs 12 mm. Lines need 3 mm. You get three yarn colours plus the base, and no gradients. It is a bold-shapes medium, which is exactly what a varsity letter is. If your design needs finer detail than that, the standard answer is a chenille base with embroidery on top.

Chenille runs bigger than people expect

From our own order records, 61% of chenille orders are 12 inches or larger and 82% are 8 inches or larger. Only 7% sit in the 2 to 5 inch band that accounts for most of our patch orders overall. Chenille is bought as a statement piece: jacket backs, arched school names, big mascots. If you are planning a jacket, design the back panel first and let the chest pieces follow.

Timing for the season

Production runs 7 to 14 business days after you approve the mockup, and your free digital mockup arrives within 12 to 24 hours. Rush puts qualifying orders in hand in as fast as 5 business days. Plan jacket assembly on top of that: the patches arrive, then your jacket supplier or tailor needs sewing time. Working backward from the first game rather than forward from today is what keeps a season order calm.

Minimums and what is included

Five pieces, at every size. No setup fees, no digitizing fees, no small-order surcharge, so a five-letter order gets the same mockup and the same unlimited revisions as a five-hundred-piece run. The felt base and a standard finished edge are included; a twill border is optional. Sew-on is what we recommend for letterman jackets, because a sewn patch can be repositioned by a tailor when a layout changes over the years.

Next: order individual chenille letters, check where each piece goes in the letterman jacket placement guide, or read the full manufacturability specifications, which we publish openly and free to cite.