Lead Times Gyms Should Plan For
By The Velocity Wear Team
Branded gym clothing takes 10 to 15 working days to produce, measured from artwork approval, with delivery transit on top. Everything before approval sits outside that window: quoting, the £150 sample round, artwork preparation and your own sign-off. A club planning a January intake should be having the first conversation in November, not in the last week of December.
How long from approved artwork to delivered boxes?
Ten to fifteen working days in the factory, then transit to your address, which varies depending on whether the delivery is going to the UK, the USA or Europe. Fifteen working days is three calendar weeks once weekends are counted, so the honest planning figure for production alone is closer to a month than to a fortnight.
That window is broadly the same whether you are ordering fifty t-shirts or five hundred, because setup and finishing account for most of it. One consequence is that splitting an order into two runs to spread cash flow costs you a second full window as well as a worse quantity band. The gyms and fitness page covers the programmes clubs run, and the wholesale range shows what is available in a single run.
When should a gym order for a January intake?
November. Work backwards: you want stock on the shelf before the first week of January, which means it needs to land in December, which means artwork approved in late November, which means the sample and quoting conversation happens in early November. Leave it until December and you are relying on nothing going wrong in the busiest shipping month of the year.
The same backwards arithmetic applies to any dated event: a club anniversary, a competition, a site opening, a rebrand launch. Fix the date first, subtract transit, subtract the production window, subtract a fortnight for approval and sampling, and the answer is your order date. There is a fuller version of this method in building a launch calendar that does not slip.
What is the fastest way to lose a week?
Artwork. A logo supplied as a small image lifted from a website has to be redrawn before it can be printed or stitched, and that round trip is invisible on any schedule because it happens before the clock starts. Send vector artwork with the first enquiry and you skip it entirely.
The second most common delay is authority. An order that sits waiting for one person to approve while they are away is an order that has stopped, and nobody notices until the date is at risk. Name a deputy. The third is indecision about colour, which holds the whole job even when everything else is ready. A general account of where time actually goes is in apparel production lead times explained.
Should you order early and hold stock?
For core items, yes. A plain branded t-shirt or cap does not expire, and holding stock means you can hand a new member a hoodie on the day they join rather than a promise. For anything dated or tied to a specific campaign, order closer in, because an event-specific garment that misses the event is worthless rather than merely early.
The compromise most clubs settle on is a deep order of the evergreen items and a shallow order of anything seasonal. That way the fifty-piece minimum lands on the garments that will definitely sell, and the risk sits only on the small part of the range that is genuinely time-bound.
