Corporate Uniforms for Salons: lead time
By The Velocity Wear Team
Salon uniforms take 10 to 15 working days to make once the artwork is approved, with delivery transit on top of that. The part buyers underestimate is everything in front of the clock: agreeing the garment, fixing the logo, confirming sizes and signing off. Treat artwork approval as the starting gun and count backwards from your opening date, not forwards from your first email.
What happens during the 10 to 15 working days?
The window covers garment allocation, decoration setup, the run itself and finishing. Screens or embroidery files are prepared against the approved artwork, the pieces are decorated in size order, then checked, labelled and packed. Private label work — woven neck labels, tear-out labels, swing tags — happens inside the same window rather than after it, which is why those details need deciding before approval rather than during production.
Where the window stretches towards 15 days rather than 10 is on multi-garment programmes: a smock, a tee and an apron running together are three setups, and they finish as a set. Our wholesale uniforms page covers what a programme like that involves.
When should a salon place the order?
Work back from the date the kit has to be on the floor.
- 1The day it is needed. Fix this first and make it the real date, not the optimistic one.
- 2Subtract delivery transit for your destination across the UK, USA or Europe.
- 3Subtract 10 to 15 working days of production.
- 4Subtract the sample round if you are taking one — the £150 sample sits in front of production, not alongside it.
- 5Subtract a week for your own approvals, because artwork rarely clears on the first pass.
For a salon opening, that puts the first conversation roughly two months out. For a rebrand of an existing floor, six weeks is comfortable. The general shape of apparel production timelines holds across products, and the salon version differs mainly in how many small garment types are running at once.
What slows a salon order down most often?
Artwork, almost always. A logo supplied as a screenshot from a website, or a file with the fonts unoutlined, has to be rebuilt before anything can be set up, and that rebuild then needs approving. The second most common delay is a size list that changes after approval, usually because a new stylist started between the quote and the order. The third is colour: a brand shade that has to be matched exactly takes a round of confirmation that a shade described as "close enough to our teal" does not.
None of these are dramatic on their own, and each adds a few days. Together they turn a comfortable schedule into a tight one. Fixing the size split early is the easiest protection, and how to break the 50 across a small salon team is worth settling before you approve anything. The salons and barbers page sets out what usually goes into a full floor kit, towels included.
A final habit worth adopting: agree internally who signs off before you ask for anything. Orders stall in the approval stage far more often than in the factory, and a salon with two owners who both want a say on the colour can lose a week without anyone noticing it has gone. Name one person, give them the authority, and the schedule holds. It also helps to send everything at once — artwork, sizes, garment choice and the delivery address — rather than in four separate emails over a fortnight, because each gap between messages is a day the production window is not running.
