Corporate Uniforms for Hotels: lead time
By The Velocity Wear Team
Production on hotel uniforms is 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, with transit after that. For a property kitting several departments at once, the schedule is governed less by that window than by how long it takes to get every department to agree its garment and sign off its artwork. The clock does not begin until the last approval lands.
How long from approved artwork to delivered stock?
Ten to fifteen working days in production, then transit to your address in the UK, USA or Europe. Inside the production window sit decoration setup, the run itself, private label work such as woven neck labels or tear-out labels, then checking and packing. Departments ordered together are finished together, which is usually what a property wants — a refit that arrives in four instalments over a fortnight is harder to manage than one that arrives complete. The wholesale uniforms page covers what a multi-garment programme involves.
If towels are on the same job, ask for them to be scheduled alongside the garments. They are quoted per job and the wholesale towels page sets out the range.
How do you time a refit or a rebrand around it?
A rebrand has a public date, and that date is usually immovable, so build the schedule backwards from it with genuine slack. Transit, then 10 to 15 working days of production, then the sample round, then your own internal approvals — and on a hotel programme the internal approvals are the long pole, because a general manager, a head of housekeeping and a food and beverage lead all have opinions and rarely have the same diary.
Ten to twelve weeks from first conversation to garments on the floor is a comfortable figure for a full property. Eight is achievable if the approvals are pre-agreed. Below that, something has to give, and it is usually the sample — which is the wrong thing to lose on an order this size. The general mechanics of apparel production timelines hold here too.
Which stages can be run in parallel?
More than most buyers realise, and this is where weeks are found.
- 1Collect size data from every department while artwork is still being finalised. These two tasks have nothing to do with each other and constantly happen in sequence for no reason.
- 2Settle private label decisions — neck labels, tear-out labels, swing tags — during the artwork stage, since they are produced inside the same window and cannot be added afterwards.
- 3Agree the towel specification alongside the garment specification rather than after it.
- 4Confirm the delivery address, access and storage while the run is in production, so nothing waits at the loading bay.
What cannot be parallelised is sampling and production: the £150 hotel sample has to be made, shipped, worn and approved before the bulk run starts, and it is credited against that bulk order when it does.
Put one person in charge of the programme and give them the authority to approve. Hotel orders slow down because three departments each hold a piece of the decision and none of them owns the deadline, so the artwork sits waiting for a meeting that keeps being moved. A single owner with a date in the diary turns a multi-week approval stage into a few days, and that is usually where the schedule is won or lost. Give that person the size data as well, because chasing headcount figures across five department heads is the other task that quietly consumes a fortnight. Neither job is difficult; both are slow when nobody owns them.
