Charities: Summer Events Order Deadlines
By The Velocity Wear Team
For a summer event in May or June, place the order in late March or early April. That gives transit, the 10 to 15 working day production window, and the artwork approval stage that comes before the clock even starts. Fundraising dates are fixed and immovable, so the sensible plan builds in a fortnight of slack rather than assuming every stage runs to its fastest.
What is the last safe order date for a June event?
Work with the date the boxes must be in hand, which for most charities is a week before the event so that kit can be counted, sorted by size and distributed to whoever is driving. From there, subtract transit to your address. Subtract 15 working days of production, which is three full working weeks. Subtract a week for artwork proofing and approval. That puts a comfortable order date around eight weeks before the event, and an anxious one at five. The charities and fundraising page is the starting point.
How do you count backwards from the event?
Write the stages in reverse on one line and put a date against each. In hand. Delivered. Dispatched. Production finished. Production started. Artwork approved. Artwork sent. Garment chosen. Quote agreed. Charities that do this once find the bottleneck immediately, and it is almost never the factory. It is the fortnightly meeting that has to approve the design. Building a launch calendar that does not slip uses the same method for a product launch.
What if you are already inside the window?
Cut the variables rather than the quality. Approve the artwork today rather than after the next meeting. Take a stock garment colour instead of a matched shade. Drop a second design and run one for everybody, which also keeps the whole order inside a single 50. Skip the sample only if you have held the same garment before. What you should not do is split the order across two suppliers to save time, because you will end up with two shades of the same shirt on the same day. Lead times charities should plan for covers the stages in detail.
Should summer kit be hoodies at all?
For a supporter selling on a stall, often yes. British summer evenings turn cold and a hoodie from $31 a piece carries a higher price on a merchandise table than a t-shirt from $13. The usual pattern is a tee for volunteers working in the sun and a smaller run of hoodies for sale, each with its own 50. If the budget only covers one, the tee reaches more people. How orders are placed is set out on the wholesale page.
How many pieces should a summer event carry?
Enough for the volunteers, plus whatever you honestly expect to distribute to supporters, plus a margin for the people who turn up unannounced. The minimum of 50 covers a volunteer team for most single events on its own, so the real question is how much sale or giveaway stock sits on top of it. Anything undated carries forward to the next event, which makes over-ordering far less painful than under-ordering on the day.
Where a charity runs several summer dates, treat them as one buying decision rather than three. A single order covering June, July and August reaches a better quantity tier, needs one artwork approval instead of three, and removes two separate deadlines from the calendar at a time of year when staff are already stretched.
Book the delivery window in the diary alongside the event itself. Summer is the season when the people who normally receive parcels are on leave, and a charity office with reduced staffing in July is exactly where a pallet goes astray. Name someone who will be there, and tell them what is coming and roughly when, before the boxes are dispatched.
