Workwear Express and Clothes2Order – worthy competitors?
In December 2024, I started to work on creating a new website for Positive Branding. In order to understand our position in the marketplace, I looked at the leading players in the printed and embroidered workwear and promotional clothing market. Two names stood out from the rest in terms of visibility on Google, so I focused on these two sites to see what they were doing. The first is www.workwearexpress.com, and the second is www.clothes2order2.com
I wanted to understand what they do to produce consistently good search results. Below are my findings. I am not a techie, but I am looking at the results from a commercial angle
This is not going to be a hatchet job, where I dismiss my competition. I will be completely fair and honest in my opinions. So, let’s look at each company in more detail and try to pinpoint what they are doing well, and in some cases, not so well.
Any web stats quoted below are taken from www.semrush.com and are completely independent.
Workwear Express
Turnover
Latest accounts show a turnover of £43,000,000
Url
Google states that a URL is not a factor when ranking a company. That the URL has the keyword in it is not important; it is the content on the website that matters. I am not convinced and see that a number of companies whose URL matches important keywords rank highly on Google. Is this merely a coincidence?
Logo and website colours
Very simple. The W of workwear has a zipper effect, to represent a zip in clothing. Orange and green website colours. A very busy homepage with lots of offers displayed. Not to my personal taste.
Domain Authority Score
37 – A number of factors contribute to making this score. This is a good score.
Keywords
This is what drives traffic to a website. www.workwearexcpress.com has 9.9k ranking keywords.
The top performing keywords are as follows, along with the relevant landing page on their website:
Workwear Express www.workwearexcpress.com
Work wear express www.workwearexcpress.com
Safety shoes www.workwearexcpress.com/footwear
Workwear Express UK www.workwearexcpress.com
Workwear www.workwearexcpress.com
Work clothing www.workwearexcpress.com
Carhatt (a workwear brand) www.workwearexcpress.com/brands/carhatt
Workwear Express Durham www.workwearexcpress.com
Scrubs www.workwearexcpress.com/scrubs
So, you can see from the above that Workwear Express is targeting keywords that are very closely aligned to their URL and actually what they do, which is to supply branded workwear.
All the above keywords are in the top 1 or 2 positions on organic search results in Google.
Clothes2Order
Turnover
Latest accounts show a turnover of £16,000,000
Url
This URL is closely aligned to what the company offers, which is an online ordering platform for custom-branded clothing
Logo and website colours
Very clear. The O of the logo has four dots inside to represent a button in clothing. Blue and white website colours. Easy to see, navigate, and see what they’re offering.
Domain Authority Score
26 – A number of factors contribute to making this score. This is a reasonable score.
Keywords
This is what drives traffic to a website. www.clothes2order.com has 5.3k ranking keywords.
The top-performing keywords are as follows, along with the relevant landing page on their website:
Clothes 2 order www.clothes2order.com
Clothes to order www.clothes2order.com
Branded clothing www.clothes2order.com
Printed clothing www.clothes2order.com
Clothes ordering www.clothes2order.com
So, you can see from the above that clothes2order is targeting keywords that are very closely aligned to their URL and actually what they do, which is to supply branded clothing online
All the above keywords are in the top 10 positions on organic search results in Google.
Positive Branding
Turnover
Nothing like the above
Url
It is an enormous challenge to try to compete with both of the above companies. You can see from their turnover that:
- They are highly successful
- They can obviously afford to invest heavily in marketing and SEO to achieve the rankings that they have
- They are getting their search strategy right
So, how can Positive Banding compete when we are a small family business without the budget or staff to compete with the likes of Workwear Express or Clothes2Order?
We need to focus on keywords that will drive traffic to our website. Search terms such as:
Embroidered Workwear
Custom Branded Workwear
Promotional Clothing
Embroidery and Printing Services
Corporate Clothing
We also need to focus on what we do well, which is to provide a professional personal service. Being small allows us to be super reactive to the market and flexible in what we offer and the price we offer it at. We are constantly looking at our website to improve and enhance the user experience.
Apart from not putting a bigger budget into SEO as we would like, our small family business has not suffered as much as one might think against the giants of the sector.
We have over 600 5* online reviews
We are proud winners of a number of industry awards – the latest being:
Corporate Clothing & Workwear Company of the Year in England – 2025
This was awarded by Global Advisory Experts, who state the following:
The shortlisted candidates were judged on client testimonials, key transactions, rankings, overall reputation, publication contributions, speaking engagements and the performance and standing of teams and individual advisers.
In conclusion, Workwear Express and Clothes2Order are worthy competitors who excel in the marketing of their business. Positive Branding can learn a lot from them regarding this. Where we score very highly is in customer experience, which is borne out by repeat business, our reviews and industry awards.