Ordering Towels for Christmas
By The Velocity Wear Team
Order in October for towels in hand before Christmas. Production runs 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, delivery transit sits on top, and both the freight network and the approval chain get slower in November. Counting backwards from a mid-December date, an October start leaves room for a sample and for one round of artwork revision without panic.
When is the last safe date to order?
Mid-October if you want comfort, end of October if you are willing to move quickly, and early November only if artwork is already approved and you are reordering an existing spec. The reason the window is wider than the 10 to 15 working day build suggests is that December freight is the busiest of the year in every market we ship to, and a consignment that would move in two days in June can take considerably longer in the second week of December.
How do you count the deadline backwards?
- 1Fix the date the towels must physically be with you, not the date they are needed for.
- 2Subtract delivery transit for your destination, and add a few days for December congestion.
- 3Subtract 15 working days for production, using the top of the range rather than the bottom.
- 4Subtract your own artwork approval time, however long your sign-off really takes.
- 5Subtract sampling if you are sampling, including its own production and shipping.
Run that honestly and most Christmas orders need to start in the first half of October. The full breakdown of the delivery side is in delivery times for wholesale towels, and the general framework in apparel production lead times explained.
What should a Christmas towel actually be?
For gifting, heavier rather than lighter. A Christmas towel is judged in the hand at the moment it is unwrapped, which pushes towards spa or hotel weight and towards packaging that looks considered. Avoid dating the design — a towel with a year printed on it is worthless in January, while a well-branded towel stays in use. If the towels are going into a hamper or a gift set, the packaging spec needs deciding at the same time as the towel itself, not afterwards.
What if you have left it late?
Drop the sample, freeze the artwork and reduce the decoration to something that can be proofed in a day. The minimum stays at 50 pieces per design whatever the deadline, so do not try to solve a timing problem by splitting the order into smaller runs. Get a quote moving through the towels page with a firm in-hand date attached, and if you want a physical check before committing, the £150 credited sample is still the fastest route to certainty.
The other honest option is to move the deadline rather than the production. A branded towel is not a seasonal product in the way a dated card or a calendar is, so a run that lands in the second week of January is still entirely usable — it simply serves a different purpose. Buyers who accept that early tend to get a better product than those who compress every stage to hit a date that was never fixed in the first place.
If gifting is genuinely the point and the timing has slipped, a gift card or a voucher covering the towel buys you the deadline back. The recipient gets something on the day, the towels arrive when they arrive, and you have not paid a premium or accepted a compromised spec to rescue a fortnight. It is an unglamorous answer, and it is usually the right one by the end of November.
Buyers who order for Christmas every year tend to settle into a rhythm of placing the order in early October as a matter of routine, before anyone has asked them to. That removes the annual scramble entirely and it usually gets a better price, because the quantity is decided calmly rather than under pressure. If this is the second or third year you have done it, put a reminder in the calendar for the last week of September and let the date do the work.
