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Event clothing is built in 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, with transit after that. Because an event date cannot move, plan on six weeks from enquiry to kit in hand, and target delivery a week before load-in. That buffer is what turns a missing carton into an inconvenience rather than a crew working in their own clothes.
How long before the gates open should you order?
Six weeks for a straightforward run, eight if a sample is involved. The production window is fixed at 10 to 15 working days, but the days either side of it are where events lose control. See what typically goes into an event order on the events and festivals page and how runs are structured on the wholesale page.
Target load-in minus seven days for delivery. Kit arriving on load-in day arrives into the busiest hours the event will have, and nobody is counting cartons while a stage is going up.
What does the 10 to 15 working days cover?
Everything from the point artwork is signed off to the point the order is packed and ready to leave. Cutting, decoration, finishing, quality checks and packing all sit inside that window. It does not cover quoting, artwork revisions, your own approval process or transit.
Working days matter more than they sound. Fifteen working days is three full calendar weeks, and a bank holiday inside that period stretches it further. Plan in working days and convert once, at the end. Our broader explanation of apparel production lead times breaks down where the days actually go.
Which parts of the timeline can you control?
Most of them, which is the useful news. The manufacturing window is fixed, but everything around it responds to how organised the order is.
- Send print-ready vector artwork first time, rather than a logo lifted from a website.
- Confirm the size split in one message instead of three, having already asked the crew.
- Name one person who can approve, so a proof does not circulate for a week.
- Decide on garment colour before requesting the quote, since a change afterwards restarts the proof.
- Book the sample early if you want one, because it sits before the production window rather than inside it.
What happens if artwork is late?
The clock has not started. That is the part worth internalising: the 10 to 15 working days runs from approval, so every day artwork sits unapproved is a day added to the total, and none of it can be recovered later.
If the date is genuinely at risk, the levers are to simplify the decoration, to drop the sample step, or to reduce the number of designs so a single run covers the whole team. Cutting from three designs to one also lifts the quantity into a better tier, with discounts reaching 35% at the top, so the compromise is not purely a loss.
For anything seasonal with a fixed date, work from the published deadline rather than from an estimate. Our post on summer events order deadlines applies this count-back to a May or June delivery, which is the busiest window in the event calendar and the one where slippage costs the most. Whatever the season, write the back-schedule down and share it with whoever is approving the artwork, because a date nobody has seen is a date nobody is working to.
Order the crew kit and the merch as one conversation rather than two. Events routinely quote the shirts in March and remember the caps in May, and a second order placed late carries the whole timeline again from the beginning. A single enquiry covering everything the event needs produces one schedule, one delivery and one set of approvals to chase.
