Ordering Christmas Merchandise: Timelines and What Works
By The Velocity Wear Team
Order Christmas apparel by early October at the latest. Production runs around 10–15 working days from artwork approval for screen printing and embroidery, or nearer 15–20 for sublimation and complex jobs, plus 2–5 working days tracked UK delivery — and the whole industry is at its busiest in exactly that window.
The Timing Problem
Christmas is the one deadline in the year that genuinely cannot move, and it arrives at the point when everyone else is ordering too. The arithmetic is straightforward: work back from the date you need stock in hand, add production time, add delivery, add a buffer for the proofing stage, and add more buffer because you will want to check the order and possibly photograph it. That calculation almost always lands in September or early October, which feels absurdly early in August and entirely obvious in November.
What Actually Sells at Christmas
Two quite different things, and confusing them wastes money.
- Gift-quality apparel — heavyweight hoodies, quarter-zips and knitwear that someone would be pleased to receive. This is where most Christmas spend goes.
- Novelty festive items, which sell in a narrow window and have no life beyond December. Order conservatively; leftover novelty stock is genuinely unsellable in January.
- Corporate gifting for staff and clients, which clusters in the first two weeks of December and needs ordering far earlier.
- Accessories such as beanies, which perform well as lower-price gifts and avoid sizing problems entirely.
Gifts Versus Novelty
The temptation is towards explicitly festive designs, and they do sell — but only until about 24 December, after which they are worthless. A good hoodie bought as a Christmas gift gets worn for years and can be reordered every season. If your budget is limited, weight it towards products with a life beyond the holiday and treat novelty items as a small, deliberately capped bet.
“"Every January, someone is looking at a box of Christmas jumpers wondering what they were thinking in October."”
Corporate Christmas Gifting
Staff and client gifts have their own timeline, because they need to be distributed before people leave for the holidays — which in practice means mid-December at the latest. Restrained branding matters more here than at any other time of year: a gift with a large logo reads as promotional material rather than a gift. A modest embroidered mark on a genuinely good garment is the specification that works.
Quantity Decisions
Christmas tempts over-ordering because demand feels certain. It is worth remembering that unsold seasonal stock is the worst kind — it cannot be discounted into January usefully and it occupies capital until the following autumn. Order to a realistic forecast, and note that bulk discounts reach up to around 40% as quantities rise, which means a slightly larger order of non-seasonal product often costs less per piece than a smaller order of novelty items.
Practical Steps
Lock your designs in September, approve artwork promptly since production starts from approval rather than order placement, and build in time to check and photograph stock before selling. Orders start at 20 pieces with mixed sizes allowed. Model quantities in the free instant price calculator and preview placement and scale in the free Design Studio before committing.