Caps for Agencies: lead time
By The Velocity Wear Team
Cap production takes 10 to 15 working days from the moment artwork is approved, with delivery transit on top. The clock does not start when the client says yes to the idea — it starts when someone signs off the final stitch file. For an agency, that gap between verbal approval and actual sign-off is where most missed launch dates are created.
When does the fifteen-day clock actually start?
At artwork approval, not at purchase order. Between the two sits digitising, a proof, and whatever internal review the client's brand team insists on. A single round of comments from a brand guardian can add a week that nobody budgeted, and it is invisible on the production schedule because production has not begun. Styles and specifications are on the wholesale caps page, and the way we work with client-side teams is set out on the corporate pages.
The practical fix is to name an approver. One person, one round, a deadline in the campaign plan. Agencies that route sign-off through a committee should add that committee's calendar to the timeline in writing.
How far ahead should a campaign order be placed?
Work backwards from the date the caps need to be in the room, not the date of the event. Allow for delivery transit, then 15 working days of production as the outer figure, then the approval round, then artwork preparation. On a UK campaign that is comfortably six to seven weeks from brief to boxes. Across the USA or Europe, add the freight leg.
- Week one: blank chosen, sample ordered, artwork prepared to the stitch file.
- Week two: sample reviewed and approved, or amended once and re-approved.
- Weeks three to five: production, 10 to 15 working days from that approval.
- Week six: transit, unpacking and distribution to whoever is handing them out.
What can be compressed, and what cannot?
Approval can be compressed, and usually should be. Production cannot — the 10 to 15 working days covers real machine time and real quality checks, and squeezing it is how you get a box of caps with a crooked logo the day before a launch. If the date is genuinely immovable and the calendar is short, the honest answer is to reduce the scope: one design instead of two, or a simpler mark that digitises cleanly first time.
The sample is the step agencies are most tempted to drop. It is the wrong one to cut on a client campaign, because the sample is the only object anyone can actually hold before fifty pieces exist — caps for agencies: samples makes that case in detail.
What happens if the client changes the brief mid-run?
Before approval, a change costs a round of artwork. After approval, it restarts the 10 to 15 working days, because the run is either scheduled or under way. Colour changes to the blank are the most expensive kind, since a different panel colour is a different design and a different fifty-piece minimum.
Build one change window into the plan and close it formally. Where a campaign runs long enough to need a second batch, plan the repeat at the same time — caps for agencies: reordering covers how repeats are scheduled, and apparel production lead times explained sets out what happens inside those working days.
