Lead Times Societies Should Plan For
By The Velocity Wear Team
Production runs 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, plus transit. For kit that needs to exist during freshers week, a committee should be gathering sizes and money in late summer and approving artwork with at least six weeks in hand. The production window is the reliable part of that calendar. The sign-up period is not.
When should a committee place the freshers order?
Before the term the kit is for, which sounds obvious and is routinely missed. Work backwards: the date members should be wearing it, minus transit, minus 15 working days of production, minus the approval stage, minus however long it takes a committee to agree on a design over a group chat. That last stage is usually the longest and the least planned. Committees that pre-agree the artwork in the previous term start the clock on day one instead of week three. The schools and student section shows what tends to be ordered on this cycle.
What does the 10 to 15 working day window cover?
Everything from approved artwork to finished, packed garments: garment allocation, decoration by whichever method you have chosen, finishing, labelling and packing. It does not cover the time spent choosing a product, the time spent waiting for a logo file, or the shipping leg to your address. Reading the window as a door-to-door figure is the mistake that turns a comfortable plan into a tight one. Our launch calendar guide sets out the same structure for a product drop.
Which stage slips most often on a student order?
Collection. Sizes and payments arrive slowly, a committee waits for the last few, and three weeks disappear before anything is ordered. The fix is procedural rather than clever: publish a closing date, order on it regardless of who has not replied, and let latecomers buy from the spare stock the 50-piece minimum leaves you with anyway. Second place goes to artwork, particularly when a crest has to be redrawn from a low-resolution image. Ask for a vector file from the union early, because it will not appear quickly at the end.
How do you plan around a handover between committees?
Place the order before the handover or hold it until well after, but never across it. An order approved by one committee and paid for by the next is where details get lost, deposits go unrecorded and nobody can find the artwork. If the timing cannot be avoided, write down the order reference, the garment, the size split and the supplier contact and hand that page over physically. Building buffer into the plan rather than hoping is covered in our piece on planning lead times with buffers, and the full catalogue lists what can be produced on the same schedule.
For anything tied to a fixture, a ball or a specific week, add a further week of slack beyond the calculated date. Kit arriving early costs a cupboard shelf. Kit arriving late costs the entire reason it was ordered.
Give one person authority to approve the artwork. Committees that approve by consensus lose days to a group chat where three people are asleep and one is on placement. Name the approver in a meeting, record it in the minutes, and let them sign off inside a stated window. Everything downstream is scheduled from that moment, so it is the one point in the process where a committee controls the delivery date directly. Everything after it runs to a timetable that has nothing to do with how quickly anyone replies.
Tell members the delivery week rather than the delivery day. Production finishes inside a window rather than on a fixed date, transit adds a few days on top, and a committee that has promised a Tuesday will spend that Tuesday answering messages. A week is honest and it holds.
