When your team works across different roles and locations, a uniform has to do more than look good.
For St Vincent’s Care Services, the challenge was finding one polo that could work seamlessly across seven different roles, while giving every wearer a garment that felt lightweight, breathable and comfortable throughout the working day.
The answer? A new polo designed around the people wearing it.
Putting wearer comfort first
Feedback on the existing polos highlighted breathability and comfort as areas for improvement. So, when St Vincent’s Care Services began looking for a replacement, the experience of the wearer was a priority.
The selected polo uses a lightweight, hard-wearing, high-performance fabric, with a menthol cooling (CoolFlow) finish designed to help staff stay cool as they go about their day.
As part of the wider rollout, St Vincent’s also moved away from their existing Ripstop pants to Deane’s customer-favourite Manuka and Kauri pants. Again, it was a comfort-first decision, choosing styles that are lightweight, breathable and have plenty of stretch for ease of movement throughout the working day.
Most importantly, the decision wasn’t made in isolation. A wearer trial played a key part in the development process, with breathability emerging as a major point of feedback. Because a uniform can look great on paper but it also has to work when people actually put it on.
That focus on comfort and function reflects Deane’s fit-for-purpose approach, which considers wearer feedback, working conditions and the needs of different roles when developing a uniform range.
One consistent look across Australia
Previously, St Vincent’s Care Services locations across Australia used different polo colours and embroidery.
The new polo creates a streamlined national look, with consistent left-hand chest embroidery across the range.
But consistency didn’t mean every wearer had to look exactly the same.
One clever detail helps make different roles easy to identify: coloured stripe tape on the sleeves.
- White: Food Services
- Turquoise: Personal Care, AIN and Home Care
- Red: Registered Nurses
- Fuchsia: Enrolled Nurses
- Jade: Services and Maintenance
- Grape: Allied Health, Lifestyle and Leisure
- No stripe: Admin and Corporate Head Office roles
It’s a simple design feature with a practical job to do, bringing different teams together under one uniform while retaining clear visual distinction between roles.
That approach also fits Deane’s emphasis on thoughtful garment details and customisation to create uniforms suited to an organisation’s specific purpose.
Made for a diverse workforce
The polo will be worn across St Vincent’s Care Services, from care teams and registered nurses through to maintenance and corporate administration.
That variety of roles made fabric and construction particularly important. The aim was a less restrictive garment that could support people doing very different jobs, without losing the cohesive look of one organisation.
And after a wearer-trial process that has been two to three years in the making, the resulting polo provides St Vincent’s Care Services with a uniform designed around what its people told them they needed.
Smarter uniforms. Less complexity.
There was another benefit to the change.
The previous polos were bought-in styles. Moving to an imported polo option supported St Vincent’s Care Services’ cost-saving efforts while also creating the opportunity to consolidate multiple existing garments into one coordinated national solution.
It’s a good example of what can happen when uniform design starts with the real problem rather than simply picking another shirt.
Comfort for the wearer.
Clearer role identification.
Consistent branding across sites.
A solution built to work at national scale.
One polo, plenty of thought behind it.
Because when thousands of working days happen in uniform, the small details aren't really small at all.
Looking for a uniform your people will actually want to wear?
Talk to Deane about creating a fit-for-purpose uniform programme for your team.