Between roughly mid-July and the end of August, every school, club and team in the country tries to sort its kit at the same time. Six weeks, and most of a year's demand crammed into them. Nothing about that window is a secret, and yet the phone conversations we have in the third week of August are always the same, and they always involve someone who believes one of the following five things.
"It's just printing. It takes a day"
The printing itself is quick. Everything either side of it is not, which is why custom kit lead times look so unreasonable to anyone who has only thought about the machine.
Decoration is a batched process. Screens have to be made, embroidery artwork has to be digitised into a stitch file, colours have to be matched and signed off, and machines have to be set up for each job before a single garment is decorated. A decorator does not run one club's order and then immediately the next; work is scheduled in blocks, and in August those blocks are already full of orders placed in June.
So the honest answer is not "a day". It is that once artwork is finally approved, most suppliers need several weeks to produce and deliver a full club order, and that stretches in peak season. The decoration queue is the bottleneck, not the machine.
"The garments are sitting on a shelf somewhere"
This is the one that costs clubs their design.
Blank garments come from wholesalers who hold stock in fixed quantities per colour and size, replenished on manufacturing cycles measured in months. In August, the popular colours in the middle sizes are the first to go, and once a size is out it does not come back next week. It comes back when the next production run lands, which might be after your season has started.
What that means in practice is that a club ordering late does not simply wait longer. It gets told that the shirt it chose is unavailable in three of the sizes it needs, and has to either change garment, change colour, or accept a mixed order. Ordering early is not about speed. It is about still having a choice.
"We'll sort the design over the summer"
Summer is the worst possible time for a committee to make decisions, because half the committee is away. Artwork approval is rarely delayed by the supplier; it is delayed by the club taking eleven days to reply to a proof because the only person who can approve it is in Cornwall.
Build in your own decision time when you plan. A realistic artwork stage includes gathering opinions, requesting the proof, one round of amendments, and a final sign-off — and every one of those steps involves a human being who has other things on. Clubs that appoint one named approver and one deputy get through it in days. Clubs that consult by group chat take weeks.
"We can add the late joiners on afterwards"
Usually you can, and sometimes it goes fine. But top-up orders carry three risks that a single order does not.
- Stock. The garment may no longer be available in that colour or size, and manufacturers do drop colourways between seasons.
- Colour matching. Fabric dye lots vary slightly. A shirt from a later batch can sit half a shade off next to the rest of the squad, which nobody notices until the team photo.
- Cost. Setup charges attach to a run, not a garment, so a top-up of four shirts repeats costs that the original order had already absorbed.
None of that is a reason to refuse a new player a shirt. It is a reason to get as many players as possible into the main order, and to ask your supplier at the outset how top-ups will be handled.
"If we pay more, it'll be faster"
Partly true, and misleading. Some decoration work can be prioritised for a fee, and a supplier will usually do what they can for a club in a genuine bind. What money cannot do is conjure blank garments that the wholesaler does not have. If the size 11-12 shirts in your colour are out of stock nationally, no amount of paying extra changes that.
The things that genuinely speed an order up are free: approved artwork, a confirmed size list, and payment sorted. A club that arrives with all three is quick to process. A club that arrives with a logo, an idea and a hope is not.
So when should a club actually order?
Think in terms of the season before, not the summer before.
- Decide the kit cycle at the AGM, not in July. If the club is changing design, sponsor or supplier, that decision belongs at the end of the previous season while everyone is still in a room together.
- Get artwork sorted in the spring, including sponsor logos and permissions. Artwork sitting ready is worth more than any deadline negotiation.
- Run the sizing before the summer break, while the squad is still turning up to training. Chasing sizes in August, when families are away, is the single most common cause of a late order.
- Place the order before the summer holidays, so production happens while the queue is shorter and stock is fuller.
- Work backwards from a real date — the first fixture, the tour, the presentation evening, the team photo — not from "the start of the season", which nobody can plan around several weeks from artwork approval, stretching considerably in the July-to-September window.
The clubs that never seem to have a kit problem are not lucky and they are not spending more. They order in the quiet part of the year, they keep their artwork and size lists where the next secretary can find them, and they decide things once.
If your kit is due a refresh, the useful thing to do now is get it quoted against a real date, even if the order sits for a few weeks. Send the garment list, squad numbers, artwork and the date you need it in hands: request a custom kit quote. Schools running kit and uniform to a term deadline can have their own ordering page in our school directory, and stock items such as match and training balls can be sorted separately whenever you need them.