Production and the calendar
The clock starts at yarn and greige booking, not at artwork approval, and the year has stops in it.
A booking dateA shipment date
The production clock starts when yarn and greige are booked, which is earlier than most first time buyers assume and is the reason a home textile lead time looks long next to a garment one. Artwork approval sits inside that period rather than at the start of it.
Ask for the schedule as dates rather than as a duration: yarn in, greige woven, dyed or printed, cut and stitched, packed, inspected, ex mill. A mill that will give you those six dates is a mill you can hold to a delivery. One that will only give you a number of days has told you nothing you can check in week four.
The year has stops in it, and they are not the same everywhere. Chinese New Year closes Chinese production for a period around it and congests freight for weeks before it. The two Eids stop production in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Turkiye, and Ramadan slows it beforehand. Summer shutdowns fall differently again. None of these are surprises, they are on a calendar, and the only expensive thing about them is planning as though they are not there. The buying calendar sets out the seasonal pattern, the Eids and the peak booking window together.
Book your freight before the peak rather than during it. On a bulky product, a container you cannot get is worse than a container that costs more.
What a bad answer looks like: a single number of days counted from your signature, with no date for yarn in, greige woven or ex mill, so there is nothing to check against in week four and the greige booking is hidden inside the total.
