How Long Do Bulk Hoodies Take to Make?
By The Velocity Wear Team
Bulk hoodies take 10 to 15 working days to produce, counted from the moment artwork is approved, with delivery transit on top. Working days means the clock ignores weekends and public holidays, so a fifteen-day build placed on a Friday lands three calendar weeks later. Everything before approval sits outside that window and is usually where deadlines are actually lost.
What happens during those 10 to 15 days?
Four stages, roughly in sequence, though they overlap on larger runs. Fabric is cut and the garments are made up to the specified weight and fit. Decoration is set up, which means screens prepared per colour, an embroidery file digitised from your artwork, or transfers produced. The run is decorated and cured. Then it is checked, folded, labelled and packed. A larger order does not take proportionally longer, because the setup is the fixed part and the decoration pass scales more efficiently than people expect. A 500-piece run is not ten times a 50-piece run in time.
Where the window does stretch is at the complicated end of decoration. A design with several screen colours needs a screen and a pass for each one, and a large embroidery has to be digitised before a single garment goes under a machine. Neither pushes a normal order past fifteen working days, but both sit at the longer end of it, so a run with one-colour chest embroidery and a run with a five-colour back print do not finish on the same day.
When does the clock actually start?
At artwork approval, not at order placement and not at the point you decide to buy. Between those moments sit several things that take real time: getting print-ready artwork out of a designer, agreeing the placement and size, proofing, and getting a named person to sign it off. On client work or committee work, that stage routinely takes longer than the build. Treat approval as its own deadline with its own date. If you need a sample first, add that to the front of the timeline as well; a sample is £150 and is credited against the bulk order.
What actually delays an order?
Very rarely the factory.
- Artwork supplied at low resolution or in a format that cannot be scaled, which means it has to be redrawn.
- A size list that is still open because someone has not replied.
- A logo colour that a brand team has not confirmed in writing.
- A change requested after approval, which restarts the window rather than pausing it.
The fix for all four is the same: fix a hard internal deadline a week before the real one and treat that as the date. The wider view of how production windows behave across apparel is in apparel production lead times explained.
How do you work back from a fixed date?
Start at the date the hoodies must be in hand, not the event date, and subtract in this order: transit to your address, then 15 working days rather than 10 so you have slack, then your approval round, then artwork preparation. For most orders that totals five to six weeks. Long-distance freight adds more, and winter routing into some markets adds more again, as Canada freight lead times in winter describes. The garment options are on the wholesale hoodies page and quantity pricing is on the pricing page.
