Lead Times Agencies Should Plan For
By The Velocity Wear Team
Put six to eight weeks in the campaign plan. Production is 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, which is two to three calendar weeks, and transit follows it. The stage that varies is client approval, and on agency work that is almost always the longest one. Plan the slack in front of production rather than behind it.
Where does the production clock start?
At artwork approval, meaning the moment the proof is signed off with the positions, sizes and colours confirmed. Not at the brief, not at the purchase order. This distinction matters more on agency work than anywhere else, because the gap between a client saying yes to a concept and signing off a proof is often two or three weeks on its own.
Build the plan in two halves: everything up to approval, which you control through the client relationship, and everything after it, which is a published window. The corporate page covers how business campaigns are scheduled, and the wholesale range shows what can be produced to it.
How do you protect a launch date from a slow approver?
Give the client a dated decision, not an open question. An email that says the proof needs sign-off by Thursday or the launch date moves to a specific later date does more than three reminders. Attach the consequence to the date, because an approval with no deadline attached will find the bottom of an inbox.
Then reduce the number of approvals needed. One proof covering every garment in the campaign beats four proofs arriving separately, because each one restarts the internal circulation. Building a launch calendar that does not slip is a workable template for the whole sequence.
What should the plan show the client?
Dates rather than durations. A client reads three weeks of production as flexible and reads the eleventh of November as fixed, so convert every stage into a calendar date at the point the plan is written. Show the sample stage explicitly if there is one, because it sits in front of approval and is the part clients forget they agreed to.
Include transit as its own line too. Delivery across the UK, USA and Europe varies by destination, and a campaign with recipients in several markets has several arrival dates rather than one. Apparel production lead times explained breaks the production half down stage by stage.
What happens when the date cannot move?
Cut scope rather than stages. If the campaign is inside four weeks, produce the one garment that matters and drop the variants, because a single design approved today beats three designs approved next week. The production window does not compress, so the only real variables left are how many designs are in it and how fast approval happens.
What does a workable campaign calendar look like?
Roughly this, counting forward from the brief. Week one, garment selection and quote. Week two, artwork and the sample request. Weeks three and four, sample review and client sign-off. Weeks five to seven, production. Week eight, transit and receipt, with the launch in week nine rather than week eight.
The slack sits in week four and in week nine, and it is there because approvals slip and deliveries occasionally do. An agency that spends the buffer in week two has nothing left when the client brand team asks for a colour change, which on this sort of work is closer to a certainty than a risk.
Share the calendar with the client as dates the moment it is agreed, and repeat it in the approval email. An approval request that restates the launch date and the cost of missing it gets answered faster than one that simply attaches a proof, and on campaign work that single habit saves more days than any other change to the process. Send it from the account lead rather than a shared inbox, so there is a named person the client is answering rather than a queue.
