Do You Deliver Outside the UK?
By The Velocity Wear Team
Yes. We ship tracked to the USA, Europe and worldwide. UK orders typically arrive 2-5 working days after dispatch, while international transit takes longer and is less predictable because of customs clearance. Import duties and taxes are set by the destination country and are usually the importer's responsibility, so check the current official guidance for wherever the parcel is going before you budget for it.
What Tracked Shipping Actually Gives You
Tracking means you can see where a consignment is and, just as usefully, where it has stopped. On international routes that second part matters more than people expect, because the useful signal is not the estimated date, it is the moment the parcel arrives at a customs facility and stays there. Tracking gives you something to act on: a reference to quote, a point in the chain to ask about, and evidence of dispatch. It does not make anything move faster. It makes the delay visible early enough to do something about.
Why International Transit Is Harder to Predict Than UK Delivery
A domestic parcel travels through one network under one set of rules. An international one is handed between carriers, crosses a border, sits in a clearance queue you cannot see into, and then enters a second national network which may have its own holidays, its own remote area handling and its own final-mile arrangements. Clearance can take a few hours or several days, and the variation is not really about the size of your order. Plan for a range rather than a date, and do not promise anyone a specific arrival day on a first shipment to a new country.
Duties and Taxes: Whose Responsibility They Are
Import duties, taxes and any handling fees the carrier charges for processing them are set by the destination country, not by us, and they are typically payable by the importer, which usually means the person or organisation receiving the goods. Rates, thresholds and the treatment of commercial versus personal shipments vary by country and change over time. We are not able to advise you on your liability, and you should not rely on any supplier who tells you they can. Check the destination country's own customs authority for current rules, and GOV.UK for the UK export side. Ask that question before you commit to a budget, not when a bill arrives.
Plan Backwards, and Pad the Right Leg
The sequence is the same everywhere: artwork approval, then production, then dispatch, then transit. Production is the predictable part, running around 10-15 working days from approval for screen printing and embroidery, nearer 15-20 for sublimation and complex jobs. Transit is the variable part on international orders. So the leg to pad is transit, not production, and the deadline to protect is artwork approval, because production does not start until then. People routinely rush the approval and then hope the shipping makes up the time. It does not work in that direction.
One Address or Many: A Decision Worth Making Early
If an order is going to several people in one country, sending it to a single address and redistributing locally is usually simpler than shipping individually. One consignment means one customs event, one set of paperwork and one point of failure to chase, rather than twenty parcels each making their own way through clearance with their own opportunity to be delayed or charged. Individual shipments make sense when recipients are genuinely scattered across countries, or when the whole point is that each person receives their own parcel. Decide which it is before the order is placed, since it changes how everything is packed and labelled.
Sizing Expectations Are Not the Same Everywhere
This one causes more grief on international orders than shipping does. A large is not a universal object, and expectations of fit differ noticeably between markets, so a garment that feels correct to a UK team can read as small or boxy elsewhere. The fix is not to guess at conversions. Publish the actual garment measurements, chest width and body length, in both centimetres and inches, and let people choose against numbers instead of letters. Do that once, share it with everyone before you collect sizes, and you avoid the worst outcome, which is a set of exchanges that have to cross a border twice.
What to Give Us Before an International Order Ships
Address formats differ, and a perfectly valid local address written in a UK layout can confuse a delivery network. Give us the full address exactly as it is written in the destination country, including any postal or region codes in their proper position, plus a named recipient and a working phone number. The phone number matters more abroad than at home, because it is often how a carrier resolves a delivery problem or a customs query without simply returning the parcel. If the destination requires a specific importer reference on the paperwork, your own customs or freight contact will tell you which one, and it is worth confirming before dispatch rather than after.
- Confirm the destination country's current duty and tax rules with its customs authority first.
- Give a full local-format address, a named recipient and a working phone number.
- Decide early between one consolidated shipment and multiple individual parcels.
- Share garment measurements in cm and inches before collecting sizes.
- Set the artwork approval deadline first, then add production and a padded transit window.
“"A parcel's journey abroad is mostly waiting. Pad the waiting, not the making."”