Lead time questions usually come with a deadline attached - a container that has to land before a trade fair, or stock that has to be in a warehouse before a season starts. Here is how a wooden toy order actually runs, and where the schedule usually slips.
1. The five stages
- Sampling. Stock items are dispatched within 48 hours. A custom sample built from your drawing or reference takes about 10 days, and a second round after your comments adds roughly a week.
- Order confirmation. Specification, quantity, packaging artwork, price and payment terms fixed in writing.
- Production. Around 30 days from confirmation for a normal order. Complexity, quantity and the number of different items all extend it; so do major holidays.
- Inspection and packing. In-line checks during production, then a final inspection on packed cartons before the container is booked.
- Freight. Booking and loading, then sea transit - typically around 30 to 40 days to Northern Europe and roughly 18 to 25 days to the US West Coast, plus port and customs time at each end.
2. Count the calendar backwards
Work back from the date the goods have to be on a shelf: allow two weeks for port congestion and inland delivery, the sea transit, one week for booking and loading, 30 days for production, and two weeks for sampling and artwork. That is roughly eleven to twelve weeks for a first order, and eight to ten for a repeat order where nothing is being re-developed.
If your date is tighter than that, sea freight is the wrong answer and the honest conversation is about air freight for part of the order or about an item that is already in stock - see the wholesale range.
3. Where a week disappears
- Artwork approval. The single most common delay. Send the logo and barcode data with the purchase order, not after it.
- Colour and finish changes after sampling. Each change to paint or timber resets part of the production preparation.
- Adding items late. A sixth item added three weeks into production becomes a second production run.
- Chinese New Year. Factories close for two to three weeks around the Spring Festival and restart slowly. Orders that need to ship before the holiday have to be placed well in advance - /knowledges/184.html sets out the calendar.
- Payment timing. Production starts when the deposit clears, not when the order is signed.
4. What we send with a confirmation
Every confirmed order gets a dated schedule: sample date, production start, production finish, inspection date, booking cut-off and estimated sailing date. Buyers who pass that schedule to their freight forwarder early usually get a better rate, because the forwarder is booking space rather than chasing it.
See the FAQ for payment terms and sample charges, /knowledges/179.html for the testing step that runs in parallel with production, and our factory page for capacity and equipment. If you have a fixed in-store date, tell us in the first message and we will build the schedule around it.
Where the production schedule meets the freight booking is covered in shipping wooden toys from China.
Where a custom item changes that schedule, the sampling steps are set out on our OEM wooden toys page.
What happens before the clock starts on production, and how the sample fee is credited, is set out in wooden toy samples: cost, lead time and sample approval.
The last stage of that timeline is the pre-shipment inspection, and what it can and cannot confirm is worth settling before the order is placed.
Lead time is also what decides whether a campaign or a listing can be served at all: see wooden toy manufacturing for crowdfunding campaigns and wooden toy MOQ.
Lead time also has one hard calendar edge a year: the 2027 Chinese New Year shutdown and order cut-off dates set out where the schedule breaks and how much buffer to add.
The shipment booked at the end of that lead time is sized by cartons rather than by order quantity, so the carton data behind our own wooden toys — volume per carton and how many sets fill a 20 ft or 40 ft container — is worth checking before you promise a delivery date.
When a fair is what triggers the order, the fair date is the deadline rather than the request date. The toy trade fair calendar gives the dates the sample window and the production window have to fit in front of.
Lead times are quoted against the same cost model, which is set out in what drives the price of a wooden toy.