How Long Do Bulk Caps Take to Make?
By The Velocity Wear Team
Bulk caps take 10 to 15 working days to produce, counted from artwork approval, with delivery transit on top. That is two to three calendar weeks in the factory. The clock does not start when you place the order or when you pay — it starts when you sign off the artwork, which for most buyers is several days later than they had assumed.
What happens in the 10 to 15 working days?
Roughly in this order. Your logo is digitised into a stitch file or separated into screens. Blanks are pulled in the colours and sizes you specified. A first-off cap is run and checked against the approved artwork for position, size and thread colour. Then the run goes through the machines, gets trimmed and inspected, and is packed — bagged individually if you asked for that, tagged if you ordered swing tags. Inspection at the end is the stage people forget exists, and it is the stage that catches a mark sitting two millimetres off centre.
When does the clock start?
At artwork approval, and nothing before. If you send a logo on a Monday and take until Friday to confirm the size and position, you have spent a working week without a single day of production passing. This is the main reason cap orders miss dates, and it is entirely fixable: decide who approves before you send anything, and give that person the authority to say yes without a meeting. What we need in the approval pack is set out in artwork setup for custom caps.
What adds days?
- 1A sample round. The £150 sample is produced, shipped to you and reviewed before the bulk run starts, which typically adds a week to ten days end to end.
- 2Artwork that needs redrawing. A low-resolution logo has to be rebuilt as vector before it can be digitised.
- 3A second decoration position, which means a second pass through the machines.
- 4Changes after approval. Any change restarts the checking stage, and a change to the artwork restarts more than that.
How far ahead should you order for a dated event?
Count backwards: transit, then 15 working days, then the sample round if you want one, then your own approval time. For a UK delivery with no sample that lands around four weeks; with a sample, six. For a USA or Europe delivery, add transit accordingly, since the shipping leg is the part that varies most by destination. Apparel production lead times explained sets caps in context against the rest of the catalogue. Current headwear options and from-prices are on wholesale caps, with the quantity bands on pricing.
What can you decide while production runs?
More than people assume, which is useful when a date is tight. Packaging is settled late: swing tags, individual polythene bagging and how the cartons are split can all be confirmed while the run is in progress, because they happen after decoration. Delivery address and method can be firmed up in the same window, though the earlier that is fixed the better the freight booking tends to be. What cannot wait is anything upstream of the needle — the artwork, the mark size and position, the thread colours, the blank, the colour split and the quantity. Those are locked at approval, and the whole schedule is built from them.
The corollary is worth stating plainly: if you are short on time, spend the days you have on the artwork and let the packaging decisions run late. Buyers routinely do the reverse, agonising over tag stock while the logo file sits unapproved. If you are working to a hard date, name one person as the approver on day one and tell everyone else their input is due before that person looks at it. That single decision recovers more days than any change to the production schedule could.
