Joggers for Gyms: lead time
By The Velocity Wear Team
Production runs 10 to 15 working days from the moment artwork is approved, and delivery transit sits after that. The clock does not start when you email us, and it does not start when you pay. It starts at approval, which is why the safest plan counts backwards from your launch date and adds a week for the approval itself.
Gyms tend to have hard dates: a rebrand going live, a new site opening, a January intake. Those dates do not move for a garment. The gyms and fitness page covers what else usually lands in the same order, and the wholesale joggers page has the garment specifics you will need to sign off before the clock can start.
When does the clock start on a jogger order?
At artwork approval. Before that point sits everything that is in your hands: choosing brushed fleece or loopback, settling on a cuffed or open hem, agreeing the colourway, fixing the size split across the 50, and signing off the logo placement. None of that is production time, but all of it is calendar time, and it is the part gyms routinely forget to allow for.
How early should a gym order for a launch date?
- 1Work back from the day the joggers need to be on the floor, not the day you want to post about them.
- 2Subtract the delivery transit to your address.
- 3Subtract 10 to 15 working days of production.
- 4Subtract the time your own sign-off takes, which for a gym with an owner and a marketing lead is rarely same-day.
What slows a gym order down most often?
Artwork that arrives in the wrong form. A logo lifted from a website is usually too small to print cleanly on a thigh, and redrawing it costs days before anything is approved. Colour is the other one: a brand colour agreed verbally rather than specified will come back for a second conversation. Deciding on the decoration method early helps too, since screen printing, DTF and embroidery each want the artwork prepared differently.
The broader picture of where time goes in apparel production is set out in apparel production lead times explained, which is worth reading once if you order kit more than twice a year.
Can a repeat run move faster than the first?
The production window is the same 10 to 15 working days, but everything in front of it collapses. The artwork is already approved, the fabric and hem are already chosen, and you have a size split that reflects what people actually took last time. In practice a second run feels much faster because the slow part has already happened. Building a buffer into your planning, as planning apparel lead times describes, turns that into a schedule you can rely on.
One habit worth adopting: if your launch has a fixed date, order a sample early rather than at the last moment. The £150 is credited against the bulk order, and having it in hand means the approval decision takes an hour instead of a week.
Naming a single approver helps as much as anything on the schedule. Gym orders stall most often when artwork sits between an owner, a manager and whoever drew the logo, each waiting for the others to comment. Give one of them the decision and give the rest a deadline to object by. Nothing enters production until somebody says yes, so every day spent in that loop comes off the front of your launch. Where several garments are being ordered at once, approve them together rather than one at a time, because a staggered approval produces a staggered delivery and a launch where half the kit has arrived.
