Delivery Times for Wholesale Joggers
By The Velocity Wear Team
Delivery on a bulk jogger order is counted separately from production. The 10 to 15 working days quoted is the build; transit to the UK, the USA or Europe sits on top of it and varies by destination, route and customs. Treat them as two lines in your plan, because merging them into one number is how orders end up arriving after the date they were needed.
Why is transit quoted separately from production?
Because the two are controlled by different things. Production time is a function of your specification and the schedule, both of which are known at approval. Transit is a function of distance, carrier capacity, customs processing and weather, none of which a factory decides. Quoting them as one figure would mean either padding the production number or promising a transit time that is not ours to promise.
The useful consequence is that you can plan the two independently. The production window is reliable enough to build a calendar on; the transit window needs a buffer. Put the buffer in the delivery half of the plan, where the variability actually lives. The garment and its options are on the wholesale joggers page.
What affects how long a delivery takes?
Destination first. A domestic UK delivery and a consignment crossing to the United States are different journeys with different paperwork. Then volume: a fifty-piece run is a handful of cartons and moves easily, while a thousand pieces is a freight decision with its own scheduling.
Then the season. The weeks before a major retail peak are the busiest of the year for every carrier on every lane, and customs queues lengthen with them. An order that clears in days in March can take noticeably longer in late November. Plan the November delivery with that in mind rather than assuming the March experience repeats.
How should you build delivery into the plan?
Start at the date you need stock in hand, not the date of the event. Take off a week of your own buffer. Take off the transit estimate for your destination. Then subtract the production window of 10 to 15 working days. What remains is your artwork approval deadline, and it is usually earlier than people expect.
Set an internal need-by date a week ahead of the real one and work to that. The teams who never air freight anything are the ones who built the buffer at the start, and the reasoning is set out in planning lead times so you never air freight. The production half of the calendar is covered in how long bulk joggers take to make.
What about shipping on to your own customers?
That is a second leg, and it is worth deciding before the boxes land. If pieces go straight out to customers, ask for individual polybagging at order stage so your team is not opening and rebagging fifty items. If they go into a warehouse first, boxed by size is easier to receive and count.
Then set customer-facing delivery promises against what you can actually hold. Promising next-day dispatch on stock that has not cleared customs is the fastest way to turn a production success into a service failure, and the trade-offs are worked through in building a shipping strategy for apparel ecommerce. Quantity tiers, which affect carton counts as much as price, are on the pricing page.
