Corporate Uniforms for Trades: lead time
By The Velocity Wear Team
Branded workwear takes 10 to 15 working days in production once artwork is approved, plus transit to site. For a contractor that means a new crew cannot be kitted from a standing start in the week before mobilisation. The practical answer is to hold branded stock against known headcount rather than ordering against each individual project as it lands.
There is an awkward tension in trade workwear planning: contracts are won at short notice and garments are not made at short notice. The way out is to stop tying orders to individual jobs. A contractor with a steady headcount can order against that headcount annually and treat the stock as a resource projects draw from, which decouples the manufacturing timeline from the commercial one entirely. Only businesses with genuinely volatile headcounts need to plan any other way, and even then a buffer covers most of the gap.
How far ahead does a site order need to go in?
Allow a month between deciding and having boxes on site, and longer if a physical sample is going through first. That covers approval, production and delivery with enough slack that a delayed sign-off does not push the date. Contractors who order against a framework or a known pipeline rather than a confirmed start rarely find themselves short.
The part most within your control is approval. Artwork sitting unsigned while a contracts manager is on site is the single most common delay, and it does not appear on any supplier timeline. Name one person who can approve, and give them a deadline.
What does the 10 to 15 day window cover?
Cutting, making and decorating the run. It begins at artwork approval rather than at enquiry or at order, and it does not include the time your own team spends confirming sizes or choosing colours. Transit sits after it and varies with destination across the UK, USA and Europe. The general mechanics are covered in apparel production lead times explained.
Volume within normal ranges does not extend the window much, so there is little to gain from trimming the quantity to go faster. Since the bands on the pricing page reward larger runs, cutting quantity to save time usually costs money without saving days.
How do you keep a crew kitted while you wait?
Hold a reserve in the common sizes and treat it as consumable stock rather than as a spare box. A contractor with twenty pieces of buffer can absorb a new starter, a lost garment and a short-notice second crew without touching the production schedule. That reserve is ordered in the main run, where it costs only the piece price of whichever garment on the wholesale uniforms page you are holding.
For anything urgent that the buffer cannot cover, plain stock in the company colour keeps people compliant on site until the branded run lands. It is not ideal, but it beats a crew in mismatched kit on a client walkover. What goes into a site programme is set out on the construction and trades page, and the buffer sizing question is covered in trade size splits.
Seasonality is worth building into the calendar as well. Orders for cold-weather layers placed in October arrive when the weather has already turned, and crews spend the intervening weeks in whatever they brought from home. Placing the winter order in late summer and the summer order in late winter means stock is in the store before anyone needs it, which is the only version of this that works reliably.
