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Peak Season Cut-Off Dates for Crochet Production

Sourcing guide · 20 October 2026 · WOOLORA

In one sentence: a crochet cut-off date is not the date you place the order. It is your on-shelf date, minus 30 days of bulk production, minus 5 to 7 working days of sampling, minus the freight transit your forwarder quotes — and it only holds if the yarn lot is confirmed at sampling stage.

Why cut-off dates are calculated backwards

Buyers usually ask a factory one question: "how fast can you make it?" It is the wrong question. The answer that matters is "on what date do you need to start, given the date I must be in stock?" — because every stage of a crochet programme consumes a fixed block of calendar, and the blocks multiply rather than overlap.

Three blocks sit on our side of the water:

• Sampling: 5–7 working days per design revision, from a complete brief. A pattern revision restarts the clock; a colour change on an approved pattern runs in one working day.
• Bulk production: 15–30 days from sample approval and deposit, depending on stitch density, finishing and the size of the run. Plan on 30.
• Inspection, packing and documents: within the production window, provided the packing specification was agreed at sampling stage rather than after production.

Everything else — ocean transit, port dwell, customs, inland delivery — sits on your side and should be taken from your forwarder's quote, not from a factory's estimate. That is why we publish our own windows and not a transit promise: the delivery timeline page sets out each stage in the same terms.

The cut-off table

Working backwards from the date the goods must leave the factory, using a 30-day production window and a 5–7 working-day sample (counted as 10 calendar days to include shipping of the sample and your review):

This table stops at the factory gate. Add your own transit and clearance time before the ex-factory date — for a winter gifting programme in the United States or the European Union that is typically the largest single block in the chain, and it is the one number a factory cannot honestly give you.

Where peak season actually breaks

Hand-work capacity does not evaporate in November. It is allocated in September, and the three failure points are consistent every year:

1. The yarn lot

A shade that has to be re-dyed is a material change. It resets sample approval and, in most cases, the scope of the test report — which means a programme that looked two weeks from production can silently become six. Locking the lot at sampling stage costs nothing and buys the whole schedule. See colourways and sampling for how the one-day colour switch works on an approved pattern.

2. Queue position

A workshop running several programmes at once has to sequence them. The programme that confirmed its sample and its yarn lot last goes last, whatever was said at quotation. This is not a lever a buyer can pull with price; it is a lever pulled by confirming earlier.

3. The Lunar New Year block

The dates move each year, but the effect does not: a block of working days disappears from the calendar, and the weeks either side of it compress. Any programme that needs to ship in the first quarter should be sampled before the shutdown rather than after it.

How much buffer to add

For a repeat order on an approved pattern and a known yarn, the 30-day window is honest and the table above is enough.

For a first order, add two weeks. The extra time is almost never consumed by production — it is consumed by the approvals that surround a first order: artwork, labelling and fibre-content statements, carton marking, and your own internal sign-off. Buyers who skip this buffer tend to lose more than two weeks to a single reprint.

If the programme carries a hard retail date, the useful move is not to compress production but to split the order: a first air shipment of the best-selling SKUs to protect the date, and the balance by sea. That decision has to be taken at sampling stage, because it changes the packing specification.

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