Ordering Corporate Uniforms for the New Year Rush
By The Velocity Wear Team
For a January intake, order in November. The build runs 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, but December contains far fewer working days than its length suggests once holidays and courier congestion are taken out. November keeps the whole sequence inside normal operating weeks, so nothing depends on a skeleton staff signing off a proof between Christmas and New Year.
When does a January intake have to be ordered?
Take the first Monday your new starters are on the floor and subtract the time it takes to hand kit out, which for anything multi-site is a week. Subtract transit. Subtract the production window, using the longer end of it. Then subtract the days December takes away from you, which is where this differs from any other month. The answer usually lands in the first half of November, and anything later is borrowing against a buffer you will want.
Note what is not in that calculation: the time your own approvals take. That runs on top, and it is the part that stretches without anyone noticing. Fixing the design in October and simply placing the order in November is the cleanest version of this.
What does the December shutdown do to your schedule?
It compresses everything. Factories, couriers and your own office all lose days in the same fortnight, and they lose different days, which is worse than losing the same ones. A schedule with a week of slack absorbs that without you thinking about it. A schedule with two days of slack does not survive one closure you did not know about.
There is a second-order effect too. Anything that needs re-running after a December delivery lands in January production alongside every other late order. Getting it right first time matters more in this window than at any other point in the year, which is a reason to check the proof twice rather than once.
Is it worth combining January with a Christmas order?
Usually, yes. If you are already buying seasonal kit, adding the January requirement to the same order pushes the total into a higher band and lowers the price on both halves. The tiers step at 100, 250, 500 and 1,000 pieces, and the reduction reaches up to 35% against the fifty-piece rate. At fifty pieces the corporate uniform price starts at $20 each, so the saving on a combined order is real money rather than a rounding difference. Our notes on ordering for Christmas cover the December half of that sequence.
Ask for the delivery to be split if you do not want January stock sitting in a stockroom over the holidays. Cartons can be packed as separate consignments, and the uniforms page enquiry is the right place to say so. What arrives on the pallet and how it is divided is covered in how bulk uniforms are packed.
How many pieces does each new starter need?
Two of each daily garment is the standard answer, so somebody always has a clean one. New starters also churn in the first quarter, and a returned uniform is rarely reissuable, so add a margin on top of headcount rather than ordering exactly. The fifty-piece minimum is per design with sizes mixed freely inside it, which makes that margin cheap at the point of ordering and expensive to add later. If the garment is new to the programme, a sample at £150 credited against the bulk order is worth running in October, and the samples page explains how.
Issue day is worth planning as carefully as the order. A new starter handed a bagged, correctly sized uniform on their first morning has a different impression of the organisation than one handed a garment pulled from a mixed crate. It costs nothing extra to sort the stock by name before they arrive, and January is precisely the month when a lot of people are forming that first impression at once.
