Ordering Hoodies for Black Friday
By The Velocity Wear Team
For Black Friday the goal is stock in hand before the promotion opens, not stock arriving during it. Build in 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, add delivery, add your own artwork and approval time, then add a fortnight of buffer so photography and listings are done in advance. That puts the order in late September or early October.
Why does the stock have to land early?
Because everything that happens after delivery takes time you will not have during the week itself. Product photography on real garments. Listings written and priced. Stock counted into a system. Packing materials bought. A pre-launch email that needs an image of the actual hoodie rather than a render.
A shipment arriving the week before the promotion technically meets the deadline and practically ruins it. Two weeks of buffer between delivery and launch is the difference between selling from a prepared page and improvising.
How many hoodies should you hold?
Work from what you can actually reach rather than from a hoped-for conversion rate. Your list size, your typical response to a promotion, and the number of designs you are running all bound the answer. Splitting a budget across three designs means three separate 50-piece minimums, which is often the wrong call for a first year.
One design, one strong colourway and a size curve weighted to the middle is easier to sell and easier to photograph. Put the depth into sizes rather than into variants, and keep a small reserve back for replacements and for anyone who orders in the following fortnight. The mechanics of setting that curve are in size splits for a bulk hoodies order.
Does a bigger order pay for itself?
It can, because the volume bands are steep. The tiers run 50–99, 100–249, 250–499, 500–999 and 1,000-plus, with up to 35% off the 50-piece price at the top, and hoodies start at $31 a piece at the minimum. Moving from 90 pieces to 100 can cost less in total than staying below the line.
The catch is that unsold stock is money sitting in a box, and hoodies are bulky to store. The sensible middle is to order to the next band boundary rather than to an optimistic forecast, then treat the remainder as normal stock you sell through the winter rather than as a failure. The pricing page shows where those boundaries fall.
What happens if you sell out?
You will not be restocking inside the promotion. A repeat run is another 10 to 15 working days from approval, which lands well into December, so plan the sell-out as an outcome rather than a problem: close the listing, take a waitlist, and put those names into a January run.
That works better if you know the repeat will match. Artwork and separations are held on file, so the main variable is the dye lot, which is why keeping a reference garment matters. Quote the follow-up run on the wholesale hoodies page, consider whether a £150 sample credited against the order is worth the days on the samples page, and see building a shipping strategy for apparel ecommerce for how the outbound side affects what you promise buyers.
