From a Sketch to a Container — How Long a Custom Decor Programme Really Takes

Buyers usually ask how long production takes. It is the wrong end of the question.

Production is the most predictable part of the whole thing. What decides whether a programme lands is the calendar — and most of the calendar is spent on decisions that happen on the buyer’s side, not on ours.

Here is the timeline as it actually runs, with the numbers we publish on this site.

Day 0 to day 10: sketch to first sample

Send a drawing, a photograph, a competitor’s piece, or a rough sketch on a napkin. Our partner’s R&D team — 10 sampling specialists, 10 sculptors and 5 designers, producing around 1,000 new samples a year — turns that into a physical first sample in under 10 days.

Ten days is the honest number for the first article. It is not ten days to a production-ready, colour-approved, tested piece. It is ten days to something you can hold, photograph for your line review, and react to.

What makes that ten days rather than three weeks:

• A dimension, even a rough one. “About 90cm tall” is enough. “Make it like this picture” without scale is what adds a week.
• A physical colour reference — a Pantone number, a swatch, a painted sample. A screenshot of a colour is not a colour.
• Which material you want it in. The same shape in powder-coated iron and in painted MDF are two different tools and two different prices.

Day 10 to order: the part that is yours

This is where programmes actually slip.

First sample lands. It goes into a line review. Somebody wants it 15% smaller. The colour reads too warm under the store lighting. Merchandising wants a second colourway. Each of those loops is another sample and another round trip.

Two revision rounds is normal and we plan for it. Five rounds is what turns a Christmas programme into a Valentine programme.

The only reliable way to compress this stage is to get the decision-makers to the first sample, rather than routing it through three people in sequence.

Order cut-off to FOB: about eleven weeks

Once an order is confirmed, the run from cut-off to goods on the water is consistent enough that we publish it. Across all six of our drops, the gap between the order deadline and the ship date is 80 to 82 days — call it eleven to twelve weeks.

Drop	Order by	Ships	Days
Valentine & Easter	10 Nov	30 Jan	81
Spring	1 Dec	20 Feb	81
Summer	20 Jan	10 Apr	80
Autumn	25 Apr	15 Jul	81
Halloween	12 May	1 Aug	81
Christmas	15 Jun	5 Sep	82

That window covers tooling, material, the run itself, hand finishing, QC and packing. Eight QC technicians work the partner lines, and third-party inspection by BV, TÜV or SGS can be booked at any point — before the container loads is the only time a finding is still cheap to fix.

The consistency is deliberate. Seasonal decor is not a make-to-order business where each programme gets its own schedule; it is a series of fixed windows that everything has to fit inside. That is also why the order deadlines are real rather than aspirational.

Then the part nobody controls

After FOB Xiamen there is ocean transit, your port, customs, and your DC. Transit times vary a great deal by lane, by season and by how congested the port is — build in more than the carrier’s quoted figure, especially for anything that has to be on shelf before a dated holiday.

Work backwards from the shelf date, not forwards from today:

shelf date
  − your DC turnaround
  − customs and drayage
  − ocean transit
  = the ship date you actually need
  − 11 to 12 weeks
  = your order cut-off
  − your sampling and approval loops
  = when you need to start

For a Christmas programme landing on shelf on 1 October, that chain puts the start of sampling somewhere in the spring. It feels absurdly early. It is why our Christmas tooling gets cut in March. The whole year laid out makes the pattern obvious.

OEM or ODM: what actually changes

ODM — you pick from what already exists and change the finish, the colourway, or the packaging. Sampling is short because the tooling exists. This is most of what moves through the six drops.

OEM — your drawing, your shape, your artwork. Add time for tooling, and expect the first sample to need at least one dimensional correction. The 10-day figure still holds for the first article; it is the approval loop that is longer, because there is no precedent to compare against.

Neither is more expensive in principle. What drives cost is quantity, the number of separate finishing operations, and how much hand-painting a piece needs.

The short version

Ten days to a sample. Eleven to twelve weeks from order to FOB. Everything else on the calendar is approval loops and ocean — and those are the two you should be padding.

If you have a shelf date in mind, send it with your first enquiry. Working backwards from it is a five-minute exercise and it tells both of us immediately whether the programme is real for this season or the next one.