Ordering Polo Shirts for Christmas
By The Velocity Wear Team
Order Christmas polo shirts in October. Production runs 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, delivery transit sits on top, and the approval itself usually takes a week of back-and-forth that nobody budgets for. Count backwards from the date you need the boxes open, not the date of the party, and you land in the first half of October for a mid-December handover.
What does the backwards count look like?
Start with the day the shirts need to be in the room. Subtract delivery transit, which depends on whether the boxes are going to a UK address, across Europe or to the USA. Subtract 15 working days for production, using the top of the range rather than the bottom, because the bottom of the range is what happens when nothing needs a second look. Then subtract the artwork window, which is where most Christmas orders actually go wrong.
Worked through for a UK handover on 12 December: fifteen working days of production from artwork approval puts approval around 21 November. Add a week for the artwork conversation and you are placing the enquiry in the middle of November at the absolute latest. Anyone who wants a sample first needs to start in October instead, because the sample is a separate build before production begins.
Where does a Christmas order usually slip?
Sign-off, almost every time. A Christmas polo has more stakeholders than a routine uniform order because somebody senior wants to see it, and that person is frequently the hardest to book. The fix is procedural: agree who approves the artwork before you send the first enquiry, and give that person a date rather than a request.
The second slip is sizes. Christmas orders are often for a whole office rather than a known rota, so the size list has to be collected rather than pulled from a spreadsheet. Close that collection a fortnight before artwork approval, not the same week, and build a handful of spare pieces into the middle sizes for the people who reply late. Because the minimum is fifty pieces per design, spare stock is almost always cheaper than a second run in January.
Should the Christmas polo be a one-off design?
It depends what happens on 27 December. A dated or explicitly festive design is worn once and then stored, which makes fifty pieces feel like a lot. A design that reads as a seasonal colourway of your ordinary polo, with the usual crest and a different body colour, carries on into January and gets worn out properly.
Piqué in a deep colour with a contrast-tipped collar is the standard compromise: it looks like an occasion garment without carrying a date on it. If you want something more obviously festive, put it on the back or a sleeve where it does not stop the shirt being wearable the rest of the year. Fabric and collar options are listed on the wholesale polo shirts page.
Is a sample worth it at this time of year?
If the polo is going to staff you will see every day, yes, and it is the one part of the timeline you can protect by starting earlier. A sample is £150 and is credited against the bulk order, and the samples page explains how the build works. What you are buying is certainty about colour and fit before fifty pieces are committed.
If you are ordering a repeat of a garment you already stock, skip it and spend the time on the size list instead. Buyers running both a Christmas order and a Black Friday promotion should read ordering polo shirts for Black Friday, because those two deadlines collide in November and the second one is earlier than it looks. First-time buyers will find the whole sequence laid out in your first bulk polo shirt order.
