Hoodies for Schools: lead time
By The Velocity Wear Team
School hoodies take 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, with delivery transit after that. The part schools underestimate is everything before approval: collecting sizes, closing the name list, and getting a signature from someone who is teaching all week. Count back six to eight weeks from the date you want the hoodies in hand.
What does the 10 to 15 working days actually cover?
It starts the moment artwork is approved, not the moment you enquire. Inside that window sits screen preparation or embroidery digitising, the print or stitch run itself, curing, quality checks and packing. Working days means working days, so a fortnight of production spans nearly three calendar weeks once weekends are counted, and a bank holiday pushes it further.
Transit sits outside that number because it depends where the delivery goes. We ship to the UK, USA and Europe, and a school in a different country to the production run needs to add that leg. Our wholesale hoodies page is the place to check the garment specification before you commit to a date.
When should the order go in for a July leaving date?
Place it in May. That sounds early for a July date and it is deliberately so. The sequence a school actually runs is: agree the design, collect sizes from the cohort, chase the third of pupils who did not respond, lock the name list, get the head of year to approve the proof, then start the 10 to 15 working days.
Each of those steps takes longer in a school than anywhere else, because the people who own them are in front of classes. Two weeks for size collection and one week for approval is realistic rather than pessimistic. A May start gives you the whole of June as buffer, and hoodies arriving before the last few weeks of term means pupils actually wear them at school.
What actually delays a school hoodie order?
- A name list that keeps changing after it has been sent, which restarts the proof cycle every time.
- Low-resolution crest artwork pulled from the school website rather than the original file.
- A size collection that never closed, so the order sits waiting on nine pupils.
- Approval sitting in an inbox during a week of exams or a trip.
None of those are production problems and none of them are fixable by paying more. They are all upstream of the fortnight we control. The broader picture of where time goes in a garment order is in apparel production lead times explained, and autumn term apparel planning covers the same discipline for the other end of the year.
What can be done if term is nearly over?
Be honest with the cohort about the date rather than promising something the calendar does not support. A realistic option late in the year is to simplify: drop the second colourway, keep the back list as one shared print, and approve artwork the same day it arrives. Those choices remove days from the run-up, not from production.
The other option is to move the delivery target to September and hand hoodies out at the start of sixth form or at a leavers event after the summer. It is not the plan anyone wanted, but it beats a rushed proof with a misspelled name in it. Our schools and leavers page sets out what we need from the school to start the clock.
