Ordering Kit for a Charity Fun Run: A Countdown Plan
By The Velocity Wear Team
Start from race day and count backwards. Screen printing and embroidery take around 10-15 working days from artwork approval, sublimation and more complex jobs nearer 15-20, and tracked UK delivery adds roughly 2-5 working days after dispatch. The number that catches people out is that production begins when you approve the artwork, not when you place the order, so every day the committee spends arguing about the logo comes out of your buffer.
Counting Back From The Start Line
Put race day in the calendar, then walk backwards. Take off the delivery window first, because that is the part you have least control over. Take off the production window next, choosing the longer figure if you are printing on technical polyester. Now you have your artwork approval date, and that is the real deadline. Anything before that point is design, proofing and internal agreement, and it always takes longer than anyone expects because charity events are run by committees and committees like a second opinion.
A sensible rule for a first-time event: give yourself a fortnight of slack between the date you think artwork will be finished and the date it actually has to be signed off. Nobody has ever regretted that fortnight.
Late Sign-Ups Will Wreck Your Size Split
This is the specific trap of fun runs. Entries do not arrive evenly. A large share of them land in the final couple of weeks, often in the last few days, driven by weather forecasts and social posts. But your artwork approval deadline sits well before that, which means you are committing to a quantity and a size spread while a good chunk of your field has not entered yet.
There is no clever trick that dissolves this. There are only two honest choices, and you should pick one openly rather than drift into the worse version by accident.
The Two Honest Options
Option one: close shirt eligibility earlier than entry. State on the entry page that a run t-shirt is guaranteed for anyone who registers by a named date, and that later entrants get one while stocks last. Runners accept this readily when it is said upfront, and resent it when it is sprung on them at bag collection.
Option two: order to a forecast and accept the mismatch. If the event has run before, use last year's actual size breakdown rather than a guess. If it has not, weight towards the middle sizes and be generous on the small end for family and junior entries, which first-time organisers routinely underestimate.
- Fix race day, then subtract delivery, then production, then land on your artwork approval date and treat it as immovable.
- Publish a shirt cut-off date on the entry form, earlier than the entry cut-off, and say what late entrants get.
- Collect size at the point of entry as a required field, not as an optional extra people skip.
- Get sponsor artwork in vector format with written permission before you start the design, not after.
- Order a modest surplus in middle sizes rather than a wide spread of extremes you will never shift.
Runner Tees Are Not Ordinary Tees
If you want a technical polyester shirt that people will genuinely run in, sublimation is the method that suits it, because the ink becomes part of the fabric and there is no surface layer sitting on top to trap sweat. The trade-off is real: sublimation works on polyester only, on light bases only, and it sits in the longer production window of nearer 15-20 working days. If your timeline is tight, a screen-printed cotton or poly-cotton tee is the safer call, and most participants will wear it afterwards anyway.
Sponsor Logos Are Where The Budget Goes
Screen printing carries a setup cost per colour. A local sponsor sends you a five-colour logo with a gradient in it, then a second sponsor sends another, and suddenly your cheap bulk print is not cheap. Two ways out. Ask sponsors for permission to reproduce their mark in a single colour, which most agree to for a charity event if you ask politely and early. Or use DTF, which has no per-colour setup and handles full-colour marks happily, at the cost of being less economical at very high volumes.
The bigger sponsor risk is not colour count. It is that sponsor logo files arrive late, and every day they are late is a day taken out of a fixed production window.
“"Entries close the week before the run. Your print run closed a month earlier, whether the committee has admitted it or not."”
Minimums, Discounts And What To Do With Leftovers
Velocity Wear works from a 20-piece minimum per order with sizes mixed freely within that run, and bulk discounts reach up to around 40% as quantities climb. That makes one consolidated run considerably better value than a small order now and a panicked top-up later, which lands you with two setups and two lead times. Plan a small surplus deliberately, sell it on the day at the registration desk, and put the proceeds back into the cause. Leftover shirts with no year printed on them can also be given to next year's volunteers, which is the quiet argument for leaving the date off the design.
You can lay out the design and preview it on the garment in the free Design Studio, and check live pricing against different quantities and methods in the instant calculator before the committee votes on anything.