Caps for Retailers: lead time
By The Velocity Wear Team
Caps take 10–15 working days to produce from artwork approval, plus transit to your destination. For a retailer the important figure is derived from that rather than equal to it: your reorder point is the lead time plus transit plus a buffer, expressed in units of whatever the line sells per week. Get that number right and the shelf never empties.
How long from order to shelf?
Three calendar weeks is a safe planning figure for production alone, since fifteen working days is three weeks before any bank holidays are counted. Transit sits on top and varies by destination — we ship to the UK, USA and Europe, and those legs are not equivalent. Then allow for goods-in, ticketing and merchandising at your end, which is usually a day or two nobody puts in the plan.
On a first order, add the front end: quoting, choosing a blank from the styles on our caps page, preparing artwork and approving it. That stage has no fixed length because it depends entirely on how quickly decisions get made. A repeat order skips it.
How do you build a restock cadence around it?
Work in weeks of cover rather than units. If the line sells ten caps a week and the replenishment cycle is five weeks door to door, the reorder point is fifty units plus a safety margin for a good week. Order at that point automatically rather than when the shelf looks thin, because by the time it looks thin you are already five weeks from a delivery.
Each restock is still a minimum of fifty pieces per design, so the cadence has to be compatible with that. A line selling three caps a week does not want a five-week cycle, it wants one larger order a season. The wholesale range gives a sense of what else can travel in the same shipment.
What breaks the timeline?
On a first order, artwork. Low-resolution files, unconfirmed colours and an approval waiting on someone who is on holiday are the three standard causes, and none of them are manufacturing problems. On a repeat order, the usual cause is simply ordering too late, which is a planning failure rather than a supply one.
Third is the change made after approval. Adding a decoration position or switching blank mid-job resets part of the schedule, since the production slot was booked against the specification you signed off. Apparel production lead times explained covers how the stages interact.
How does the destination change the date?
Materially, and it is the part most likely to be underestimated. Distance, customs and seasonal freight conditions all sit outside the production window and all land on your arrival date. Build the transit leg from your own experience of the route rather than from an average; getting stock into Canada is a good illustration of how much a single route can vary by season.
If you buy for several regions, quote the split delivery at the start. Shipping everything to one warehouse and redistributing adds a leg, adds handling and adds days that your reorder point has to absorb.
If you carry several cap designs, stagger the reorder points instead of letting them fall together. Orders landing in the same week tie up the budget at once, fill goods-in at once, and leave every line thin at the same time five weeks later. Spacing them smooths both the cash and the workload, and it means a delay on one shipment does not empty the whole fixture. It is a scheduling habit rather than a buying one, and adopting it costs nothing. The same logic applies across regions if you supply more than one location, since a staggered plan gives you room to move stock between sites when one sells faster than the other.
