Ordering T-Shirts for Black Friday
By The Velocity Wear Team
Black Friday is sold from stock, not made to order, so the whole plan turns on having boxes in the building before promo week. Count back from the Monday before: transit, then 10 to 15 working days of production from artwork approval, then the days the artwork itself takes. That puts the order in early October and the artwork decision in late September.
What date does the artwork have to be approved by?
Approval is the date that matters, because the production clock starts there and nowhere else. If you want shirts sitting on your shelf on the Monday before the promotion, take that Monday, subtract three or four days for delivery, then subtract 15 working days rather than 10. Fifteen working days is three calendar weeks. That lands you at the start of October for approval, and approval is rarely first time, so the artwork needs to be in our hands a week earlier.
Buyers who miss this usually miss it by treating the order date as the start of the clock. It is not. An order placed on the first of the month with artwork still being redrawn on the twelfth is a twelfth-of-the-month order. Lock the design first, then place the order.
One design or several?
The minimum is 50 pieces per design, so every extra design is another 50-piece commitment. That maths decides the answer more often than taste does. Three designs at 50 pieces each is 150 pieces at the entry price tier. One design at 150 pieces sits a tier up and costs less per shirt, while leaving you a single SKU to photograph, list, pick and pack.
There is a genuine case for two: a hero design that carries the promotion and a plain logo shirt for the buyers who do not want a graphic. Beyond two, you are usually buying yourself a stock problem in December. Tees start from $13 a piece at the 50-piece minimum and the discount rises with quantity to a ceiling of 35% off that rate, across the 50 to 99, 100 to 249, 250 to 499, 500 to 999 and 1,000 plus tiers, so consolidating designs is also the cheaper route. From-prices are on the wholesale t-shirts page.
Should you sample before a promo run?
For a promotion, yes, because the photography depends on it. A £150 sample, credited against the bulk order, gives you a physical shirt to shoot for the product page and the ads six weeks before the shirts exist in quantity. That is often the real reason to sample: not to check the print, but to have something to photograph while there is still time to build the campaign around it. The samples page covers what you get and how the credit works.
Order the sample the moment the design is close, not once it is signed off. If it comes back and you want the chest print two centimetres higher, you want that discovery in September.
What happens to shirts that do not sell?
Plan for it at the design stage rather than in December. A shirt with a discount percentage or the words Black Friday printed on it has no life after the weekend. A shirt carrying your own brand graphic sells all year and merely happens to be discounted during the promotion. The second one is almost always the better commercial decision, and it means an over-order is inventory rather than waste.
Size curve matters for the same reason. Over-order the middle sizes, which clear on their own, and be conservative on the extremes, which are what is left on the rail in January. If you are new to sizing a speculative run rather than a headcount, the reasoning in bulk custom t-shirt pricing will help you set the quantity where the price tier and the sell-through agree. The seasonal timing logic carries over from ordering t-shirts for Christmas, which sits four weeks behind this one on the same calendar.
