How to Collect T-Shirt Sizes for 100 Employees in Slack

How do you collect t-shirt sizes for 100 people in Slack? Not with a thread. The “drop your size below 🧵” message tops out around 60% response even after three reminders, and turning 80 scattered, inconsistent replies into a clean vendor order sheet is an evening of copy-paste you’ll resent. T-shirt sizes look like the most trivial data-collection task there is, which is exactly why teams under-invest in the method and then lose a week to it — a small problem that scales badly the moment you have a real headcount and a hard order deadline.

Why the thread fails

Threads fail in three specific ways, and each one costs you. They have no structure — people reply “M” without specifying fit, cut, or whether they meant unisex or fitted, so you’re left guessing or asking again. They have no tracking — finding out who hasn’t answered means manually diffing the thread against your roster, by hand, every reminder round. And they have no persistence — next year you start from zero and run the whole thing again. Emoji-react voting is worse, not better: it hard-caps your options to the number of reactions you set up and silently double-counts whoever taps two.

The pattern that works

1. Structured collection. A short form or, better, a field on each person’s profile with exactly three things: cut (unisex/fitted), size, and quantity. (Still on Google Forms for this kind of recurring data? See our Google Forms alternative for why it breaks down here specifically.) Link a real size chart — “M” varies between brands more than people expect, and an unlinked size question guarantees a batch of returns. Keep it to three fields; every extra one costs responses.

2. Message the stragglers, by name. This is the highest-leverage step. Channel reminders mostly reach the people who already answered — they’re the ones still reading the channel. A personal “hey, need your size by Friday for the order” reaches the rest, because a named, direct ask is much harder to scroll past than a broadcast.

3. Order with a buffer. Roll responses into counts per cut and size, then add roughly 10% in your two most common sizes. New joiners between order and delivery, the inevitable sizing mistakes, and the person who “definitely said L” will all draw down that buffer — budget for them rather than being surprised.

4. Keep the data. Sizes barely change year to year. Store them against the person rather than the order, and next year isn’t a campaign at all — it’s a glance at what you already have, plus whoever joined since. Same collect-once principle that should govern every durable fact about a person.

The 100-person math

At 100 people, plan around realistic numbers rather than hope: expect roughly 70% response to a well-run structured ask in the first week, climbing to about 90% once you’ve messaged the holdouts directly, and a final 3–5 people you’ll simply decide for — order their best-guess size, rounded up, because chasing the last few past the deadline costs more than the spare shirts. Budget a full week for the cycle, with the vendor’s order deadline as a hard, non-negotiable backstop you build the schedule backward from.

Doing it once instead of annually

The reason this task is annoying isn’t the asking — it’s that most teams throw the answers away and start over. Sizes, dietary needs and accessibility requirements are facts about a person, not facts about an event, and they belong somewhere that outlives the order.

That’s how TeamRally holds them: each person’s sizes and dietary details live on their own profile, they update them when something changes, and every future event picks them up automatically — so the swag order and the offsite catering read from the same place, and neither one needs a fresh form. Because it knows your team, you can also see at a glance who’s still missing and message just those people rather than the whole channel.

Related: the event logistics checklist.

---

Collect it once, reuse it forever — then get on with the good part. TeamRally runs your team’s celebrations and events in one place. Start free.