Ordering Joggers for Black Friday
By The Velocity Wear Team
Black Friday only works if the boxes are already on your shelves, so the order goes in around two months ahead. Production is 10 to 15 working days after artwork approval, transit follows, and approval itself rarely happens in a day. Buying to arrive during promo week is how brands end up selling a pre-order and refunding it in December.
What date does the stock have to land?
Pick a date at least two weeks before the promotion opens. That buffer is not padding: it is the time you need to check the delivery, photograph the product, fix a listing and deal with anything that arrived wrong. Then work backwards through transit, the 15 working day end of the build window, and the artwork round trip. A useful sanity check is that the deadline for this drop and the one in ordering joggers for Christmas are only a few weeks apart, so most brands run them as one order.
How deep should you buy before a discount week?
Deeper than feels comfortable on your best seller, and no deeper than the minimum on anything untested. The floor is fifty pieces per design, and sizes inside that fifty are yours to split. Where it gets interesting is the tier structure: moving from 50-99 up through 100-249, 250-499, 500-999 and 1,000-plus takes up to 35% off the fifty-piece price. If you are planning to discount at 20% anyway, a deeper buy can fund the promotion out of the unit cost rather than out of margin. The current from-price of $22 a piece sits on our wholesale joggers page.
Which jogger spec survives a heavy sale week?
Keep it simple. One cut, one or two colourways, a decoration that photographs cleanly in a listing thumbnail. Loopback in an open hem is the safest bet across a mixed customer base because it fits more people without a fitting; brushed fleece with a cuff is the better upsell if your audience is buying for winter. What you want to avoid is a complicated multi-colour print approved two days before the file goes to production, because that is the thing that moves the date.
Does a sample still fit in the plan?
Only if you order it early. A sample is £150, credited against the bulk order that follows, and it is the only way to check a fabric weight and a cuff before you commit to several hundred pieces. Ordered in the same week you request the quote, it costs you nothing in calendar terms. Ordered after you have already agreed the run, it just delays the run. See what the process looks like on our samples page.
Should you take pre-orders instead?
It is a legitimate option if you are honest about the ship date, and it removes the risk of buying stock that does not move. It also removes the impulse purchase, which is most of what Black Friday is. The trade-off is set out properly in pre-order or buy stock first. If you go that route, still place the production order before the promotion rather than after it, so the ship date you advertise is one you can hold.
Decide in advance what happens to whatever does not sell. Promo-week stock that is still in the box in mid-December has to go somewhere, and a plain jogger with a small mark can be carried into the next season without looking dated, while anything referencing the sale itself cannot. Keep the promotional messaging in the listing and the email, not on the garment. That one decision is usually the difference between leftover stock and dead stock, and it costs nothing to make at the artwork stage.
