Ordering Towels for the New Year Rush
By The Velocity Wear Team
Order in November for towels in place before the January intake. Production is 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, transit follows, and the December shutdown sits in the middle of that window doing nothing useful for your schedule. November also means you are ordering while the previous year's stock levels are still fresh enough to plan against.
Why order in November for a January intake?
Because December is not a working month in the sense a schedule needs. Freight is at peak, offices close for a fortnight, and the people who approve artwork are dealing with the year end. An order placed in early November can be produced, shipped and received before any of that begins. An order placed in December is competing with the busiest freight period of the year for a delivery that has to land in the first week of January.
What does a January gym towel need to do?
Survive a wash every single day for eight weeks. The new year intake is the highest-turnover period a gym has, and towels handed out at reception go straight into a laundry cycle that does not let up until March. That pushes the spec towards a cloth that dries fast, holds colour under hot washing and does not go stiff by February. It also means ordering more than you think, because towels walk out of the building during a busy intake and never come back.
Get the cloth decision right first, since everything else follows it — the trade-offs are set out in choosing fabric for wholesale towels. Send the spec through the towels page with the laundry regime described honestly.
How do you avoid over-ordering for a spike?
Order to your steady-state consumption plus a defined spike allowance, not to the peak. A gym that gets through a certain number of towels a week in November does not need twelve months of January volume; it needs January covered and a reorder ready. The volume discount rises to 35% off the 50-piece rate at the highest tier, which rewards a bigger commitment, but only if the towels get used. Towels are quoted per job, so ask for two quantities side by side and look at the actual difference before committing.
What does the December shutdown do to the plan?
It removes roughly two working weeks from a calendar that looks like it has six. A plan drawn on calendar weeks between mid-December and mid-January is wrong by about half. Count in working days, place the order in November, and treat anything still outstanding on 20 December as work that restarts in January. If you are also ordering for the festive period, ordering towels for Christmas covers that overlap, and a £150 credited sample taken in October leaves the November order as a formality.
There is a storage question attached to ordering early that is worth answering before you commit. A November delivery means holding the stock through the quietest weeks of the year, which needs dry, clean space where cartons will not be opened or borrowed from. Linen absorbs damp and odours readily, so a corner of a plant room is not the answer. Agree where it goes before the pallet arrives.
Use the quiet fortnight productively as well. December is when you can photograph the product properly, brief reception staff on how the towels are issued and returned, and set the reorder trigger level in whatever system tracks your stock. None of that is possible once the intake starts, and a stock process agreed in advance is what stops February becoming an emergency.
Keep a record of what the intake actually consumed, week by week. The January rush is the most predictable event in the calendar and the only thing standing between you and an accurate order next November is a note of what happened this year. Members joining, towels issued, towels returned, towels never seen again: four numbers, written down once, turn next year's quantity from a guess into arithmetic.
