Ordering Towels for Black Friday
By The Velocity Wear Team
For Black Friday the towels need to be in your hands before the week starts, which makes late September or early October the realistic order point. Production is 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval and transit follows, but the binding constraint is that promotional stock cannot arrive mid-promotion. Work to an in-hand date at least a fortnight before the sale.
What date does stock need to be in hand?
Two weeks before the promo, minimum. That buffer covers photography, listing setup, packing and the inevitable problem discovered on unboxing. Stock that lands the day before a sale is stock you cannot photograph, cannot describe accurately and cannot pre-sell. Back up from that in-hand date through transit, through 15 working days of production and through your own approval time, and the order date lands comfortably before the end of October at the latest.
How many should you commit to?
Enough to cover the week without carrying a year of dead stock. The temptation is to chase the volume discount, which reaches up to 35% off the 50-piece rate at the highest tier, and that saving is real — but only on units that eventually sell. A sensible approach is to order to a quantity you would be content to hold into the new year, since a towel is not seasonal in the way a dated product is. Work the tiers on the pricing page against a realistic sell-through, not an optimistic one, and get the format split right using size splits for a bulk towels order.
What sells in a promo week?
Bundles and recognisable items. A branded towel sold alone competes with every towel on the market; sold as part of a gym set, a gift pairing or a bundle with an existing bestseller it stops being a price comparison. Keep the design bold enough to read in a thumbnail, because a promo week is won and lost in the listing image. And keep it undated, so anything left over on the Monday is still saleable in February.
Where does the timeline usually break?
At approval, and at freight. Approval breaks because the person signing off the proof is busy with everything else happening in October. Freight breaks because November is the peak of the year in every market and a consignment that normally moves quickly does not. Neither is a production problem. Get the spec settled through the towels page, and if you plan to repeat the promo next year, read reordering wholesale towels in colour before you finalise the artwork. A £150 credited sample taken in September removes most of the risk.
Build a checkpoint into the plan rather than waiting to find out. A week after the proof goes out, check it has been opened. A week before the consignment is due, check the carrier has a delivery slot and somebody at your end knows to expect it. Two short conversations at those points catch nearly every problem that would otherwise surface on the day the stock was meant to be on a shelf.
It is also worth deciding in advance what you will do if the delivery slips past the promo week. Holding the stock for a January sale is a perfectly good answer for an undated product, and knowing that in October takes the panic out of the conversation in November. What you should not do is redesign the towel around the promotion, because that removes the option entirely.
Worth remembering too that a promo week is not only a selling opportunity. Towels bought at a discount get used, which puts your branding in gyms, bathrooms and on beaches for years afterwards at a cost per impression nothing else comes close to. Judging the run purely on the margin taken during the week undervalues it, and it pushes buyers towards a thinner product than the job deserves.
