T-Shirts for Cafes: lead time
By The Velocity Wear Team
Production is 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, with delivery transit on top. For a cafe that means about four weeks from the day you settle the logo to the day the boxes arrive, and around five if you want to see a sample first. A new site should get the order in as soon as the opening date is fixed, not once the fit-out is finished.
How long before new cafe tees arrive?
Two to three working weeks of production, then transit. The clock starts when the artwork is approved, which for a cafe is usually the shortest stage — most have a single logo and one print position, so there is little to argue about. The wholesale t-shirts page is where the garment and decoration get specified, and the restaurants and hospitality page covers the rest of the uniform if it is going on the same order.
When should a new site order its kit?
Six weeks before opening. It sounds early and it never is. Opening weeks move, but they move in both directions, and a site that opens a fortnight ahead of schedule with staff in their own clothes has lost the only chance it gets at a first impression. Six weeks leaves room for a sample, for a logo file that turns out to be a low-resolution image, and for the week where everyone is dealing with the coffee machine instead of the uniform.
For an existing cafe the trigger is different: order when your stock of unissued shirts drops below the number of new starters you expect in the next quarter. That is a number most managers can estimate well from their own rota history.
What slows a hospitality order down?
Artwork supplied as a photograph of the shopfront or a low-resolution web logo, almost always. A print file needs to be vector or high enough resolution to separate, and rebuilding one costs days of back-and-forth. The second is indecision on the garment colour, which sounds trivial but stops the order entirely until it is settled.
A £150 sample credited against the bulk order is the third factor, and it is worth taking on a first run — it just needs to sit inside the calendar rather than after the decision. Our sampling guide covers what to check when it lands.
How do you avoid ordering under pressure?
Keep a buffer of unissued shirts in the sizes your rota actually uses, and set a reorder point rather than waiting for zero. A cafe that reorders when it has ten shirts left never has to ask whether anything can be rushed, because the four-week cycle fits comfortably inside the buffer. Our restocking guide sets out how often that tends to come round for a small team.
What should be ready before you place the order?
A usable logo file is the main one, and it is the thing most independents do not have. If the only version anybody can find is on the shopfront or in a social media header, get a proper vector copy from whoever designed it before you need it rather than in the week the shirts are due.
After that, the garment colour and the size spread. Colour sounds like a small decision and stops an order dead while three people disagree about it, so settle it in advance. The size spread needs asking your actual staff rather than guessing, which takes one shift to collect and saves a cupboard of shirts nobody can wear.
With those three settled, a cafe order is genuinely quick. The conversation is short because there is very little left to decide, and the four-week clock starts on the first call rather than the third or the fourth.
