Schools: Leavers Season Order Deadlines
By The Velocity Wear Team
Leavers kit for the last term should be ordered in spring. Production is 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval and transit follows it, but the governing constraint is the name list: gathering, checking and freezing two hundred names takes weeks, and the build cannot start until it is final.
How early does a leavers order need to start?
Begin in the term before the one you are delivering into. That gives you a clean run at the collection of sign-ups, the fit question, the artwork and the approval, with the production window landing comfortably inside the final term rather than against its last week.
Schools that start in spring hand kit out with a fortnight to spare. Schools that start after Easter spend the last month chasing a delivery date they cannot influence.
There is a second reason to be early. Leavers kit competes for attention with exams, and the weeks when pupils are most available to sign up are precisely the weeks before study leave begins. Collect the list while the year group is still in front of you every day, not once half of them are at home revising.
Why does the name list set the real deadline?
Because it is the only part of the job that depends on two hundred individual people. Pupils sign up late, change their minds about the version of their name they want printed, and appear after the cut-off. Every one of those is a change to the artwork, and a change to the artwork after approval restarts the approval.
Freeze the list on a published date and do not reopen it. Then have one person read every name against the school register, because the register spelling is the one parents will compare it to.
Decide in advance how you handle preferred names, hyphenated surnames and accented characters, and write the rule down before the list goes out. Those three cases account for most of the corrections that arrive after artwork has been sent, and settling them once at the start is far quicker than adjudicating them one at a time under deadline.
What does the spring calendar look like backwards?
- 1Handover date: two weeks before the last day, so pupils can wear and sign the kit.
- 2Delivery: allow transit ahead of the handover, not on the same day.
- 3Build: 10 to 15 working days, starting only once artwork is approved.
- 4Approval and name check: a fortnight, longer if it crosses a half term.
- 5Sign-up window and sizing: four to six weeks before that.
Laid out that way, the order date is obvious and it is earlier than most people expect. The general habit is set out in planning apparel lead times so you never air freight.
What happens if a few pupils sign up after the cut-off?
Personalised pieces cannot be added to a run that has started, so late names either wait for a second run of 50 or take one of the unpersonalised spares you sensibly ordered. Holding five or ten plain pieces in middle sizes is the standard insurance and costs far less than a second minimum.
Size the main run to the sign-ups plus that buffer. The minimum is 50 pieces per design with sizes mixed inside it, so a cohort of any realistic size clears it in one go. See the schools and leavers page for the garments involved and the wholesale range for where each starts on price.
Tell pupils the cut-off is real when you publish it, and give the reason. A year group that understands the list feeds directly into a printed garment takes the deadline far more seriously than one that has simply been told to hurry up. It also removes the argument in the final week, because the rule was clear from the start.
