Every year a proportion of corporate Christmas gifts arrive in the second week of January with an apology attached. It is almost never the manufacturing that failed. It is the address list.

August and September: decide the material

This is the only window where every option is still open, including die-struck metal, which needs tooling cut before anything exists. Deciding here also means you get first call on artwork time rather than queueing behind everybody else’s November panic.

It costs nothing to get a mockup now and sit on it. We keep the file.

Late September: approve artwork

Approval is the clock start — production does not begin until you say yes, so an artwork approved on the 25th and one approved on the 5th of the following month are ten days apart in delivery, not ten days apart in effort.

Get the mockup in front of whoever has the final word early. The most common two-week delay in this entire process is one senior person on annual leave.

Early October: lock the address list

This is the deadline nobody treats as a deadline, and it is the one that fails. Address lists are always more out of date than anyone believes, and cleaning four hundred rows takes longer than printing four hundred ornaments.

If we are mailing for you, we need names, addresses and any per-piece personalisation in one spreadsheet. Sending the artwork on time and the list three weeks late achieves nothing.

Late October: production

Roughly two weeks from approval on every range except die-struck metal. This is the part that reliably works and the part everyone worries about.

If you have a fixed date, say so when you request the quote rather than after approval, and we will confirm in writing whether it is achievable before you pay anything.

November: mailing

Individual mailing takes longer than shipping one carton to one office, and carrier volumes climb steeply through the month. Posting in the first half of November means gifts land while people are still at their desks.

Anything posted after the first week of December is competing with the entire retail season for carrier capacity.

The single biggest saving

Order in October rather than November and the same gift costs less, ships calmer and arrives earlier, because express turnaround and expedited freight both stop being necessary.

We would rather tell you that in August than take an express fee in December.