Offices: Christmas Order Deadlines
By The Velocity Wear Team
For branded office clothing in hand before Christmas, place the order in October. Production is 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, delivery adds several more, and December transit is slower than the rest of the year. October gives you room for one artwork round and a sample; November does not, and by December the answer is January.
When is the last safe date to order for December?
Aim for artwork approved by the middle of October. That puts dispatch in early November and delivery comfortably before the party, the client gifting round or whatever the fixed date is. Our corporate clothing page shows the pieces that suit December, and the wholesale page explains minimums and tiers.
Note the phrase is artwork approved, not enquiry sent. If you begin the conversation in mid-October you are already behind, because quoting, logo files and internal sign-off can absorb a fortnight before anything reaches production.
How does the October timeline break down?
Take the date the kit must be on site and subtract each stage in turn. The arithmetic is not complicated; the discipline is in doing it before you start rather than after something slips.
- 1Fixed date: the day the kit is needed in the building.
- 2Minus one week: courier transit, allowing for December volumes.
- 3Minus 10 to 15 working days: the production window from approval.
- 4Minus one week: artwork rounds, size collection and internal approval.
- 5Minus two weeks if you want a physical sample first.
Run that back from the third week of December and you land in the first half of October with a sample, or the middle of October without one. Our broader guide to lead times offices should plan for has the same count-back applied to a normal start date.
What makes the Christmas window tighter than it looks?
Three things compress it, and all three are invisible when you plan from a calendar rather than from working days.
- Working days are not calendar days. Fifteen working days spans three full weeks, and December bank holidays remove more.
- Couriers run at peak volume from late November, so transit estimates stretch exactly when you can least afford it.
- Internal approval slows as people take leave, and a signature nobody can obtain is a hard stop.
- Everyone else is ordering at the same time, which is the one factor you cannot manage from your side.
There is also a decision most offices leave too late: whether the kit is for staff, for clients, or both. Those are usually different garments and different quantities, and each design needs its own 50 pieces. Settle it in September. Our guide to apparel that gets worn is useful if the gifting half is in question.
What if you have missed October?
Be honest with yourself about the date first. If the kit is genuinely for a party in the third week of December and it is now late November, the run will not make it, and a promise to the contrary is worth nothing.
The better move is to reframe. Order now for January, when the New Year intake needs kit anyway, and treat the delivery as a start-of-year piece rather than a Christmas one. You get a calmer production window, a more considered design, and no courier peak to survive. If the December date is immovable, cut the sample step and keep the design to something already proven, because that is the only time genuinely available to recover.
Quantity helps here too. Combining the staff gift and the January onboarding stock into one order lifts you up the discount tiers, which run to a maximum of 35%, and removes an entire second round of admin from a month that has enough already.
Decide before the boxes arrive who is storing them and who is handing them out. Kit delivered in early November and then forgotten in a stockroom until the week of the party arrives creased, unsorted and short of somebody's size. Ask for cartons labelled by size, open them on arrival and count against the packing list, and the December end of the job takes an hour rather than an afternoon.
