Ordering Tracksuits for Christmas
By The Velocity Wear Team
Approve your artwork in October for tracksuits you need in December. The build takes 10 to 15 working days from approval, transit follows it, and artwork plus size collection usually eats another week or two before any of that starts. Counting backwards from mid-December, the safe point to place a fifty-set order is the first half of October.
When is the last safe date to approve artwork?
Work in working days rather than calendar days. Fifteen working days is three clear weeks. Add transit, add the days your own side needs to sign off a proof, and the honest answer for a mid-December handover is an approval date in the third week of October. Later is possible, but it stops carrying any slack at all.
Slack is the whole reason to order early. A colour that comes back wrong, a size split that changes, a logo file that needs redrawing: each is a handful of days. In October a handful of days costs nothing. In late November it is the difference between having the sets and explaining why you do not.
Why does December compress everything?
Two reasons, neither of them to do with the factory. Carriers run at capacity from late November and transit stretches accordingly. And the calendar loses days of its own: working days exclude weekends and public holidays, so the back half of December is far shorter than a wall planner makes it look.
Crossing a border makes the compression worse, because customs queues behave the same way. Delivery to the UK, the USA and Europe is routine for most of the year, and in December it needs a buffer. Delivery times for wholesale tracksuits sets out what the transit half actually depends on.
Your own calendar shrinks too, which is easy to overlook. Whoever approves the artwork is running everything else in November as well, and the people you are collecting sizes from get harder to reach every week that passes. A timeline that works on paper depends on decisions being taken quickly, and December is the month when decisions are slowest. Build a spare week into the plan and it will be used.
What does a sample buy you in October?
Certainty about the part you cannot judge from a screen. A £150 sample is credited against the bulk order, so on an order you intended to place anyway it costs nothing and removes the risk of fifty sets arriving in a grey you did not picture. In October there is time to act on what it tells you. In December there is none.
It settles internal arguments too. A physical set on the table ends the debate about weight and fit faster than any amount of written specification, and that gets the artwork approved sooner, which is the date the entire timeline hangs from.
What if October has already gone?
Simplify instead of panicking. A one-colour print clears faster than a six-colour one, a stock colourway avoids dye lead time, and dropping a secondary placement removes an operation. Sets on our tracksuit range open at $53 each once you reach the fifty-set minimum, and simpler decoration does not move that minimum.
The other honest option is to move your own deadline. Plenty of gifts are handed over in January, and a set that arrives on the second of January beats a rushed one that arrives wrong. Building a launch calendar that does not slip is worth reading before next year comes round.
