Events: Tour Season Order Deadlines
By The Velocity Wear Team
Tour merch should be ordered six to eight weeks before the first date. Production runs 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, transit follows, and stock needs to be counted, split and loaded before anyone leaves. Ordering against the first date rather than the announcement is what keeps the opening night from selling out of nothing.
How early does tour merch need to be ordered?
Six weeks without a sample, eight with one. The first night is usually the strongest selling night of a run, so arriving with partial stock costs more than it appears to. The events and festivals page covers the garments that move at a merch table, and the wholesale page shows how quantity affects the rate.
Artwork is the usual bottleneck. Tour designs go through more approvals than corporate ones, sometimes across management, label and artist, and each round is days rather than hours. Start the artwork conversation before the routing is even finalised.
What does the first-date count-back look like?
Anchor it to the load-out before the opening night, not to the night itself. Stock that arrives while the truck is being packed is stock that travels uncounted.
- 1First date: fixed, and usually announced long before the merch is agreed.
- 2Minus one week: stock counted, split by venue and packed.
- 3Minus three to five days: transit to the address you control.
- 4Minus 10 to 15 working days: production from artwork approval.
- 5Minus one to two weeks: artwork rounds across everyone who has to approve.
- 6Minus a further fortnight if a sample is being made.
Should merch ship to the venue or the warehouse?
To somewhere you control, always. Venue deliveries are signed for by people with no stake in the order, stored somewhere nobody can name afterwards, and impossible to chase mid-afternoon on a show day. Take delivery centrally, count it, then move it with the tour.
Split the stock before it leaves, not at each door. Decide the per-venue allocation from capacity rather than dividing evenly, since a 2,000-capacity room will outsell a 400-capacity room by more than five to one on the same night.
How do you plan a restock mid-tour?
Assume six weeks and check whether the routing allows it. Most tours do not have six clear weeks left by the time anything sells out, which means the restock decision has to be made before the first date rather than after the third.
- Order the sizes you know will run short, usually medium and large, in larger numbers than the curve suggests.
- Remember the 50-piece minimum applies per design on a restock exactly as on the first order.
- Keep the design free of tour dates so anything left over sells online afterwards.
- Place the second run early, against the projection, rather than waiting for the shortage to be certain.
Where a restock is genuinely likely, it is usually cheaper to order the larger quantity up front, because the discount tiers step at 50, 100, 250, 500 and 1,000 pieces and reach up to 35% off the entry rate. One order also means one dye lot, so the shirt sold in week six matches the one sold on opening night. Our restocking guide for events covers what carries forward between runs, and custom printing for events and merch covers the decoration side of the same decision.
Think about where the surplus goes before the final date rather than after it. Stock left at the end of a run can sell online for months if the design carries no dates and the remaining sizes are ones people want, which is a further argument for weighting the order towards the middle of the range. Plan the route from the merch table to the web store while the tour is still being booked.
