Ordering Caps for Christmas
By The Velocity Wear Team
Start a Christmas cap order in the first half of October. Production runs 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, which is two to three calendar weeks on its own, and in front of that sit artwork sign-off and any sample you want to see. Behind it sit delivery transit and your own picking and packing. October gives all of that somewhere to go.
When is the last safe date to order Christmas caps?
Fix the date the caps must be usable, not the date they must arrive. For retail that is the day the listing goes live. For a staff gift it is the day of the party. For a club it is the last training session before the break. Then count backwards in blocks rather than guessing a single number.
- 1Artwork approval: allow a week if more than one person signs off, and longer if a committee is involved.
- 2Sampling, if you want one: a sample is £150, credited against the bulk order, and it adds its own round trip to the schedule.
- 3Production: 10 to 15 working days from the moment artwork is approved, not from the moment you enquire.
- 4Transit: depends on whether the caps land in the UK, the USA or Europe, and on how busy the carriers are in late November.
- 5Your own handling: receiving, counting, bagging for a shop or splitting for a giveaway all take days nobody ever budgets for.
Add those up honestly and the first half of October is not early. It is the point at which every stage still has slack in it. Quantity and style are settled on the wholesale caps page, and once the specification is agreed the clock starts at artwork approval.
Should you sample before a Christmas run?
Sample when the cap is going on sale, when the colour has to match something else you already sell, or when the artwork has never been stitched before. Skip it when you are repeating a design you have run previously and only the quantity is changing. The samples page sets out what a sample includes and how the £150 is credited back against a bulk order.
The scheduling point is that a sample is not a delay if you plan for it, and is a disaster if you do not. Requesting one in mid-November with a 10 December deadline leaves nothing behind it. Requesting one in early October leaves room to change the thread colour and still ship on time.
What actually goes wrong in December?
Rarely the factory. What goes wrong is approval drift, where nobody chases the person who has to sign off the artwork, and carrier congestion in the last two weeks of November. Both are outside the production window and both are avoidable by moving the whole schedule earlier rather than by asking for the build to be rushed.
The other recurring problem is a design that only works for one Christmas. A cap with a year printed on it is dead stock in January. A cap with your own mark on it in a seasonal colourway sells for months. General timing across apparel is covered in apparel production lead times explained, which is worth reading before you commit a date to anyone.
What if October has already gone?
You still have options, but they shrink. Keep the decoration to one position and one or two thread colours so approval is quick. Keep the colourway to a stock crown colour rather than a matched one. Accept a plain stitched mark rather than 3D puff, which needs more setup. And place the order against a firm in-hand date so everyone downstream knows what they are working to.
If the caps genuinely cannot land before Christmas, aim the run at the next selling moment rather than forcing it. The same artwork and the same stock work for a January launch, and the timings for that are in ordering caps for Black Friday and the new year posts in this series.
