Bands: Tour Season Order Deadlines
By The Velocity Wear Team
Have tour merch ordered six weeks before the opening date and delivered a week before it. Production is 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, transit follows, and everything before approval takes longer than a band expects. Six weeks also leaves time to place a second run once the first few dates show you what is actually selling.
How early does tour merch need to be ordered?
The order should go in six weeks out, and the boxes should land seven days before the first show so that stock can be counted, sorted by size and packed into the van properly. A delivery that arrives on the day of the opening date is a delivery nobody checks, which is how a size error reaches the table unnoticed. Announce dates first and order merch second, but do not let the gap between the two stretch past a couple of weeks. The bands and music page lists what we produce.
Should the whole tour be covered in one order?
Split it. Order enough for the first third of the dates at the 50-piece minimum or a little above, then reorder on real numbers once you have seen three or four tables. That costs slightly more per piece than buying the whole tour upfront, but it removes the risk of carrying an unsellable graphic around the country for six weeks. Bands repeating a design that has already sold through can reverse this and buy to a higher tier immediately. Minimum orders for bands covers how the blocks of 50 work.
What goes wrong when you order in the same month as the opening date?
The proofing stage collapses. Artwork gets approved without anyone looking closely, the size split gets copied from the last tour rather than reconsidered, and there is no room to correct a colour that came back wrong. Then transit becomes the gamble, because there is no slack left anywhere else. Late orders do not usually fail outright, they just arrive with mistakes nobody had time to catch. Planning lead times with buffers shows where the slack should sit.
Where should the boxes be delivered?
A fixed address that someone will be at, not a venue. Venues are empty during the day, sign for nothing and store nothing. Deliver to a home or a rehearsal space a week ahead, count everything against the order confirmation and repack it into date-sized boxes. We deliver to the UK, the USA and Europe, so a tour crossing borders should confirm the destination early rather than mid-run. The wholesale page sets out how to place the order.
What should travel with the merch boxes?
A printed count of what shipped, by design and by size, and somewhere to write down what leaves the table each night. Merch disappears on tour through a hundred small honest routes: pieces given away, sizes swapped, a box opened in a hurry at the back of a venue. Without an opening count you cannot tell a sell-through from a shortfall, and the restock decision becomes guesswork at exactly the point it needs to be accurate.
Keep one piece of each design sealed and untouched as well. It is the reference for the next run, it settles any question about how the first batch looked, and it costs nothing but the discipline to put it aside before the first date rather than hoping one survives the tour.
If the tour crosses a border midway, work out where the stock will be at that point before the order is placed. Moving boxes between countries partway through a run is slower and more complicated than having them delivered to the right side of the border in the first place, and it is a question that has a simple answer in advance and an expensive one afterwards.
