Corporate Uniforms for Offices: lead time
By The Velocity Wear Team
Office apparel takes 10 to 15 working days to produce from artwork approval, plus transit. Because office rollouts are usually pinned to an announced date such as a rebrand launch or a conference, the sensible approach is to fix that date first and work backwards through transit, production, approval and the sample, rather than starting at the enquiry and hoping.
Treat the internal stages as though they had their own lead time, because in practice they do. Collecting sizes across a distributed team takes longer than most people allow, particularly where colleagues work different days or sit in different time zones, and it cannot begin until the garment and its size chart are chosen. Mapping those internal steps onto the same timeline as the production ones produces a realistic date. Mapping only the supplier steps produces a date that slips by a fortnight and surprises everybody.
How early does an office rollout need to start?
Six to eight weeks ahead is comfortable for a first programme, and four is workable if the design is settled and no sample is needed. The stages that consume time inside a business are rarely the production ones: internal sign-off, a marketing review of the artwork and a finance approval each add days that no supplier schedule accounts for.
Assign one owner for approval and give them authority to sign. A rollout stalled between three people who each want to see the artwork is the most common reason an announced date slips. Programme structure is outlined on the corporate and offices page.
What fits into the 10 to 15 working days?
Making the garments and applying the decoration. The window opens at artwork approval, not at the point the order is discussed, and it closes when goods are ready to leave rather than when they land. Transit to the UK, USA or Europe is added after it and confirmed against the destination. The background to why that window sits where it does is in apparel production lead times explained.
The quantity does not meaningfully extend it within normal ranges, so reducing the order to go faster is a poor trade. Given the bands on the pricing page reward larger runs, a smaller order generally costs more per piece and arrives at much the same time.
How do you time a launch around a rebrand?
Artwork has to be final before anything is approved, and rebrands are notorious for late changes. Ordering against a brand guideline that is still in draft means either waiting or accepting that a late tweak restarts the process. The safer sequence is to let the brand sign off first, take the £150 sample against the final mark, then commit the run.
Where the launch date genuinely cannot move, order the garments in the final colours and hold the decoration decision as briefly as possible rather than the other way round. Keeping a programme tidy over time is covered in building a corporate apparel programme, and the garment range itself is on the wholesale uniforms page.
Leave a buffer week at the end for distribution rather than counting delivery as the finish line. Boxes arriving sorted by size still have to be checked, broken down and handed to several hundred people across floors or offices, and doing that in the twenty-four hours before a launch event is how mistakes happen. A week of slack turns the rollout into an administrative task instead of a scramble.
