Polo Shirts for Offices: lead time
By The Velocity Wear Team
Production takes 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, with delivery transit on top. The clock does not start when you place the order; it starts when the artwork is signed off. For an office with a conference, an office move or an onboarding intake in the diary, count backwards from the date the kit is needed and allow for the days your own approvals will take.
What actually starts the clock?
Artwork approval. Everything before that point is preparation and sits outside the 10 to 15 working days: agreeing the garment from the wholesale polo shirts range, confirming the colour, collecting sizes, laying out the logo at the right scale, and getting whoever owns the brand to say yes. In a company of any size, that last step is the one that eats a week. A single named approver, briefed before the quote goes out, is worth more to your delivery date than any amount of chasing afterwards.
If you want a sample first, add its own stage in front of all of that. The £150 sample is credited against the bulk order and is the right call for a first run, but it is a sequential step, not a parallel one. Polo shirts for offices: samples explains what it covers and when it is worth skipping.
When should you place an order for a fixed date?
Work back in four blocks: transit to your address, 15 working days of production as the safe end of the window, a few days for artwork rounds, and your own internal sign-off. For an event in six weeks that is comfortable. For one in three it is tight but workable if the artwork is already settled and sizes have been collected. For one in ten days it is not, and the honest answer is to change the plan rather than the deadline. You can start the conversation from the corporate page.
Seasonal load matters too. Autumn is heavy for corporate orders because conference season and new intakes collide, so a September delivery decided in late August has less slack in it than the same order placed in June. Nothing about the stated window changes; your margin for a second artwork round does.
What causes the delays that do happen?
Almost always artwork and sizes. A logo supplied as a small screenshot has to be redrawn before it can be stitched or separated for screens, and that redraw needs approving, which is another round trip. Sizes gathered by email from sixty people take as long as the office is slow to reply. Both are solvable a fortnight before the order rather than during it.
- Logo supplied at a size too small to reproduce, needing a redraw
- Brand approval waiting on somebody who was never told it was coming
- A size list still missing a dozen people when the order is placed
- A garment colour changed after approval, which restarts the sign-off
- A delivery address that turns out to be a site with no goods entrance
Can anything be brought forward?
The preparation can, and that is where the real time lives. Collect sizes while the quote is being prepared, as polo shirts for offices: size splits describes, and have the logo ready as vector artwork before the first conversation. Firms that run apparel as an ongoing programme rather than a yearly scramble, along the lines of building a corporate apparel program, get their kit faster because nothing has to be decided twice. The production window itself is fixed; the queue in front of it is not.
If your date is genuinely immovable and close, say so in the first conversation rather than at the end of it. Knowing the deadline changes the advice we give about garments and decoration, because some combinations reach approval faster than others.
