How Long Do Bulk Towels Take to Make?
By The Velocity Wear Team
Bulk towels take 10 to 15 working days to produce from artwork approval, with delivery transit on top. The number people get wrong is the start point. The clock begins when the artwork is approved, not when the enquiry is sent, so a week spent circulating a proof internally is a week added to the date the boxes arrive.
What are the 10 to 15 working days spent on?
Setup, production and finishing. Woven branding is built into the towel as it is made, so the setup happens before any fabric exists and the whole run is produced against it. Printed branding is applied to finished towels, which puts the setup later in the sequence but does not shorten the total.
Finishing, checking and packing take the last part of the window. The range in the figure, 10 days against 15, mostly reflects quantity and how many designs are running together. A single design of 50 sits at the short end. Several designs, several colours and a four-figure quantity sit at the long end. The specification is on our wholesale towels page.
When does the clock actually start?
At approval. Before that sits everything the buyer controls: agreeing a specification, supplying usable artwork, deciding a colour, and getting a sign-off from whoever has the final word. On a corporate or club order that stage regularly takes longer than production does.
If you want a sample, add its round trip at the front as well. A sample is £150, credited against a bulk order, and it is worth taking on a first order, but it sits before the production window rather than inside it. Build it into the plan rather than discovering it as a delay. Lead times across the rest of the catalogue are set out in our post on apparel production lead times.
How long should you allow on top for delivery?
It depends on the destination. We deliver across the UK, USA and Europe, and the transit leg is separate from the production window in every case. A domestic delivery is short; a cross-border one is not, and customs clearance adds a variable that no production schedule controls.
The safe approach is to treat the production window as fixed and the transit as the part to pad. If the stock has to be somewhere on a particular day, build in slack after production rather than assuming the two stages will both land at their best case. Freight timing is discussed further in our post on freight lead times into Canada, and the tier structure that applies to the order itself is on our pricing page.
What makes an order run late?
Four things, and three of them happen before production. Artwork supplied at a resolution too low to use. A colour reference that turns out to be a screen value with no physical equivalent. An approver who is on leave. And, occasionally, a specification change agreed after the run has started, which resets the process rather than adjusting it.
Avoiding all four is mostly a matter of front-loading. Send vector artwork, agree the colour against a physical reference, name a single approver with a deadline, and lock the specification before approval rather than after. Do that and the 10 to 15 working days is the whole of your exposure.
Plan the receiving end as well as the sending end. A delivery that arrives when nobody can take it in gets carded, returned to a depot and re-attempted, and two days can vanish at the very end of a schedule that had otherwise gone perfectly. Give an address where somebody is present in working hours, keep the contact number on the order current, and warn whoever sits at that address that several boxes are on the way so they are not turned away at the door.
