T-Shirts for Retailers: lead time
By The Velocity Wear Team
Production runs 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, with transit on top, so a retailer should plan on roughly four weeks from commitment to stock in hand. That figure is what sets your restock cadence: any line you intend to keep on the shelf needs at least four weeks of cover at current sell-through before you reorder, plus a margin for the weeks that sell faster than average.
How long does a retail t-shirt order take?
Two to three working weeks of production and then shipping to the UK, the USA or Europe. The window starts at artwork approval rather than at the enquiry, which for a repeat line means the clock effectively starts the day you say go. The wholesale t-shirts page carries the garment and decoration spec, and the wholesale overview covers the other products if you are consolidating a buy into one delivery.
How does lead time set your restock cadence?
Turn it into a reorder point rather than a date. Take weekly units sold for the line, multiply by the four-week cycle, add a safety margin of a week or two, and that total is the stock level at which you place the next order. A line selling twelve a week needs to reorder at around seventy units on hand, not at ten.
The mistake is treating the reorder point as a fixed number across a whole range. A fast line and a slow line with the same four-week lead time have completely different trigger levels, and applying one number to both guarantees you are simultaneously out of stock on one and overstocked on the other.
When should a seasonal order be placed?
Six to eight weeks before the selling window opens, not four. The extra fortnight covers the artwork round, a £150 sample if the design is new — credited against the bulk order — and the week you will want for photography and listings before anything goes on sale. Committing early also means a slipped approval does not eat into the season itself.
If the design is new rather than a repeat, add the sampling loop on top of everything else. Depth matters here too: ordering the season in one deeper run rather than two shallow ones puts you in a better tier, which our cost guide explains in full.
What goes wrong on a rushed retail order?
Corners get cut where they are least visible. Artwork gets approved without anyone seeing it on the actual garment colour. Size curves get copied from the last order rather than from what sold. Samples get skipped on a new base garment, which is the one place a surprise is genuinely expensive — comparing blank t-shirt bases shows how much they differ. None of these are production problems and none of them can be fixed by production. They are all the consequence of starting the four-week clock a fortnight too late.
What does a working restock calendar look like?
Review stock weekly, not monthly. A monthly review on a four-week lead time means a line can go from healthy to empty inside a single review cycle, and by the time anybody notices you are four weeks from having it back. Weekly counts on your top lines cost ten minutes and remove that failure mode entirely.
Alongside that, keep one standing decision: which lines you are willing to hold deep and which you accept will go out of stock occasionally. Trying to hold everything at full cover ties up more money than an independent usually has, and trying to hold nothing means constant gaps on the rail.
Finally, plan the seasonal buys in the quiet weeks rather than the busy ones. The autumn order placed in a calm August is a better order than the same one placed in a frantic September.
