Ordering Hoodies for Trade Show Season
By The Velocity Wear Team
Count back from the day the stand goes up, not the day the show opens. Production takes 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, and delivery transit sits on top of that. For a trade show hoodie order at the 50-piece minimum, start the conversation five to six weeks out. That leaves room for one artwork revision and still puts boxes in the office with a week spare.
When does the order actually have to be placed?
Work in working days, because that is how a factory counts. Ten to fifteen working days is two to three calendar weeks with no weekends inside them, and a bank holiday quietly adds another. Before that window opens there is artwork approval, which takes a day if your file is print-ready vector and a week if the logo arrives as a screenshot from a website and has to be redrawn. After the window closes there is transit. Five weeks is comfortable for a UK stand; six is safer if the show is in Europe and the kit is going to a hotel rather than an office.
The date that matters is build day. Stand crew wear the hoodies while they are unpacking crates and arguing with the electrics, and that is usually the afternoon before doors. If you plan to the opening keynote you have removed a day from your own buffer without noticing. Put the build date in the brief so the deadline in the supplier system is the real one. The wholesale hoodies page lists the from-price and the decoration options, which is the quickest way to turn a rough plan into a quote with a date attached.
Where does the sample fit in the calendar?
A sample is £150 and it is credited against the bulk order, so on a real run it costs you time rather than money. Allow a week for it to be made and a few days to reach you. Six weeks out, a sample fits with room to spare. Three weeks out it does not, and you are choosing between approving unseen or moving the launch to the next show. Ordering a sample early is cheap insurance; ordering one late is usually the thing that breaks the date.
When the calendar is already tight there is a middle path. Approve a print strike-off and a fabric swatch in the fleece colour rather than a finished garment. You see how the ink sits on brushed-back fleece and whether the brand colour survives contact with the fabric, without waiting for a hoodie to be cut and sewn. It tells you nothing about how the fit sits on a person, which is the trade-off explained in AI mockups vs physical samples.
Should stand staff and giveaway stock be the same hoodie?
The 50-piece minimum is per design, and that is the fact that decides this. A staff hoodie in your brand colour with an embroidered chest mark and a giveaway hoodie in heather grey with a large printed back are two designs, so two runs of 50 and two sets of screens. Most stands run one design and vary nothing but the size split. If you genuinely need two, the combined quantity pushes you into the next discount tier, so the second design is less painful than it first looks.
Weight is the other decision. Brushed-back fleece runs from 280 to 450 GSM, and the two ends do different jobs on a stand. A 280 GSM hoodie is wearable for eight hours on a hot hall floor under exhibition lighting. A 450 GSM one photographs better and feels like something worth carrying home, which is what you want for the piece you are handing to a prospect. The difference in the hand is covered in GSM explained for bulk hoodies.
What should be agreed before the run starts?
- The build date, written into the order, not the show opening date.
- A single delivery address that can receive a pallet during working hours.
- Whether hoodies arrive individually bagged or loose in size-run cartons.
- Who signs off artwork, and how fast they can do it on a Friday afternoon.
- What happens to leftovers, because a stand rarely gives away every piece.
That last point is worth thinking about before you pick sizes rather than after. Trade show giveaway stock skews to the sizes you had left over, and a box of XS hoodies is dead weight for a year. Ordering fewer pieces in the extreme sizes and more in the middle is the usual answer. If this is your first run, the sequence from enquiry to delivery is set out step by step in your first bulk hoodie order.
