Lead Times Bands Should Plan For
By The Velocity Wear Team
Give merch six weeks before the first date. Production itself is 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, with delivery transit after that, and the stages before approval eat more time than bands expect. Artwork that arrives as a low-resolution image needs rebuilding, and the rebuild happens before the production clock starts rather than during it.
How long before the first date should merch be ordered?
Six weeks is comfortable, four is tight, and anything inside three depends on luck. The stages are quoting, artwork preparation and proofing, production, and transit to wherever the boxes need to land. Bands add a complication that most buyers do not have: the delivery address moves. Shipping to a home address before the tour starts is almost always safer than shipping to a venue, because a venue signs for nothing and holds nothing. Understanding lead times and delays covers what tends to slip.
What happens during the 10 to 15 working days?
Blanks are pulled and checked, screens are burned or the embroidery file is loaded, a first-off piece is run and inspected against the approved proof, then the run goes through printing or stitching, curing, finishing and packing. Each step has a queue behind it. That is why the window is quoted as a range rather than a single number, and why a band asking for a firm date should ask for the top of the range. Three working weeks is the figure to write in the tour plan.
Where does a touring schedule break the timeline?
Two places. The first is approval, because band decisions involve four or five people who are rarely in the same room, and a proof waiting for a group chat to agree can sit for a week. Nominate one person to sign off. The second is the delivery window, since a box arriving on the day of the first show is a box nobody can count. Build the arrival for a week before the opening date, and see tour season order deadlines for the count back.
Does a sample fit inside a tour timeline?
It fits if you plan for it. A sample costs £150 and is credited against the bulk order, but it carries its own production and shipping before the main run begins, so it wants to be requested at the start of the process rather than halfway through. For a design you have run before, skip it and work from a kept piece. For a new garment or a new decoration method, it is worth the fortnight. The bands and music page lists what we produce, and ordering runs through the wholesale page.
What should be ready before a quote is requested?
The artwork in its original form, the garment you have in mind, the quantity and the delivery address. Having those four to hand turns a quote around in a day instead of a week, and the first one is where bands lose the most time. A graphic that exists only as a compressed image from a social post has to be redrawn before it can be printed, and that redraw sits outside the production window entirely.
Decide the size split at the same time. It is not needed for a price, but it is needed before the order can be confirmed, and leaving it until the last moment is how a run ends up copied from the previous tour instead of chosen. Ten minutes on a size split before the quote saves a week of stock sitting unsold at the wrong end of the range.
Where a tour is announced months ahead, use that gap rather than saving it. Getting the merch settled early is the one part of tour preparation that genuinely can be finished in advance, and doing it in a quiet month instead of the week before rehearsals starts is worth more than any shortcut a supplier could offer you later.
