- Top apparel decorators share how they prepare for the busiest—and most profitable—season of the year
- For today’s print shops, the holiday season can be a make-or-break time for both sales and their production processes
A&P Master Images (masteryourimage.com) closed out this past December with an extra $70,000 in sales—and a hard-working team that was able to enjoy a couple of long weekends at both Christmas and New Year’s. Three years earlier, though, the Utica, New York-based shop’s operation looked very different.
“We were dealing with staff morale issues and a lack of visibility into what was happening internally,” says CEO Howard Potter. “Once I realized there was a problem, I went area by area, figured out what was going wrong and started fixing it.”
For many decorators the holidays are not just a make-or-break season in terms of profits, they’re also a make-or-break season in terms of their production processes. Photo by amenic181 – stock.adobe.com
Fast forward to the fall of 2025, and with A&P’s team and workflows now operating like a well-oiled machine, Potter challenged his staff. “If they worked overtime as needed, we’d give them Thursday through Sunday off for Christmas and New Year’s,” he says. “They put in the time, got paid extra and enjoyed two back-to-back, four-day weekends. It felt like a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders.”
For print shops, the holiday season is more than just “busy.” It’s often a make-or-break time for both sales and their production processes in general. From Halloween through New Year’s, order volumes spike, deadlines tighten and pressure builds across every department.
For some decorators, Q3 and Q4 are the most profitable stretch of the year. For others, it exposes cracks in staffing, inventory and production workflows can be easy to ignore until the pressure hits. What follows are some methodologies to help your shop make the most of this time of year—and maintain its sanity to boot!
Why the Holiday Season Matters to Custom Apparel Decorators
At Philadelphia-based RushOrderTees (rushordertees.com), the fall-to-winter season represents one of its biggest sales stretches. “Between Halloween, Thanksgiving, holiday parties, corporate gifting, charity events and New Year’s, the volume picks up significantly starting in October and doesn’t let up until mid-January,” says RushOrderTees’ Aidan Nichols. “It’s consistently one of our highest-volume quarters.”
In this same vein, Brooklyn Park, Minnesota-based Fast Track Products (fasttrackproducts.com) says it pulls in twice its normal sales between October and December, while for Yuba City, California-based Trik Koncepts (trik-koncepts.com) December is biggest month, followed by Halloween. Same thing with 1-800-TShirts.com (1800tshirts.com). “There’s a mix of corporate gifts and promotional products, as well as bundling to curate custom gift boxes,” says CEO Tom Rauen. “We also do a lot of ugly Christmas sweater designs.”
As for Beloit, Wisconsin-based Walnut Creek Apparel & Gifts (walnutcreekapparelandgifts.com), a smaller local firm that offers a combination of wholesale and retail services, December is also a busy time for retail shop’s foot traffic. “Customers come in for personalized and ready-to-gift Christmas items,” says owner Nikkie Chadwick. “It’s definitely our most active month on the retail side.”
Prep Time Starts Earlier Than You Think
To handle the increased demand, RushOrderTees—which has hundreds of employees and a 60,000-square-foot production facility producing millions of garments annually—starts its holiday planning in August and September. Interestingly, when it first opened in 2002, the shop focused on the Thanksgiving-to-Christmas window. However, the company soon found itself having to expand its approach after being “caught off guard” by the wave of New Year’s orders and early-January events,” Nichols says.
Kwanzaa, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween, you name it: it’s game on when the year comes to a close! Photo by AnnaStills – stock.adobe.com
In terms of the nuts and bolts of getting its house in order, Nichols says the shop’s priorities include staffing levels, inventory forecasting and ensuring its production schedule has the capacity to handle the surge without sacrificing turnaround times.
“That last part is non-negotiable,” he says. “We built our business on meeting deadlines other shops wouldn’t touch, and we don’t let that slip because volume is up. Planning for the full October-through-mid-January arc has made a real difference in how smoothly things run.”
Similarly, at Trik Koncepts, owner Keith Burwell says the company starts planning its October promotions in July. “We serve travel ball teams and schools with Halloween and Pink October tournaments—those shirts are always big in our community,” Burwell says.
Then there are those shops that take a year-round approach. “We start planning for the next season immediately after the current one ends,” Chadwick says. “That allows us to evaluate what worked well while it’s still fresh in our minds and begin brainstorming new product ideas, especially for stock items and custom gift offerings.”
As for the team at Monroe, North Carolina-based USColorworks (uscolorworks.com) owner and founder Rodney McDonald says he and his staff start planning for their fourth quarter in mid-January. “The holiday sprint is too important to treat as a short-term effort,” McDonald says. “If you wait until fall to prepare, you’re already behind…People don’t consider how much complexity increases with holiday volume. It’s more pressure, tighter deadlines and more activity. Processes that worked at 80 percent capacity fail.”
What Holiday-season Decorated Apparel Demand Looks Like
In terms of his company’s product mix over the course of the holiday season, Nichols says Christmas brings everything from corporate gifts to matching family shirts, holiday party apparel and team gear. The shop also sees strong spikes around Halloween for group costumes and themed events, and New Year’s party apparel. As for Thanksgiving and Hanukkah, they tend to see more family-oriented orders, including reunion shirts and tradition tees. “Each holiday has its own personality when it comes to what customers order,” he says.
As for Walnut Creek Apparel & Gifts, Chadwick says that because many of her company’s wholesale customers pick up their orders in person, they’re already familiar with her product line as a whole, which in turn makes it that much easier for them to know what they want come Christmastime. “While retail accounts for about 25 percent of our total sales, it plays a crucial role,” Chadwick says. “It allows customers to experience everything we offer firsthand, which in turn supports our wholesale growth.”
The latest tracking and production management software will only get you so far. Communication is also vital to successfully dealing with the holiday rush. Image by irawan710 – stock.adobe.com
Not surprisingly, these days many decorators also see online ordering as a major driver. “We get more sizing questions, more design consultations and tighter deadlines because the gifts need to arrive on time. There’s also a wave of repeat customers who return every year for the same events, like ugly sweater parties or company holiday gatherings,” Nichols says. He adds his company invariably experience a surge in last-minute orders from people who didn’t plan ahead as well.
Similarly, Potter says A&P Master Images does a brisk business managing hundreds of online holiday stores, stocking them with reusable, high-value items, like hoodies, fleece jackets, winter accessories, tumblers and backpacks. “A lot of companies give their employees, customers or students digital gift codes worth $25 or $45 so they can pick out exactly what they want,” Potter says of the way these kinds of platforms work.
Along these same lines, Potter describes how one of his corporate customers recently spent $20,000 on high-quality book bags as a gift for traveling staffers. “We also do fulfillment, so we bundled these items with letters from the CEO and then individually bagged and mailed the gifts to each recipient’s home,” he says.
What It Feels Like at Peak Rush
As for the day-to-day of getting through the holiday season, even in the best of times, it can be pretty stressful, no matter what kind of planning you do.
Over at Walnut Creek Apparel & Gifts, for example, Chadwick says, “We encourage early shopping with promotions earlier in December, but the week leading up to Christmas is always our busiest. Even on Christmas Eve, we have customers hoping for last-minute custom items. We do our best to accommodate, but custom work has its limits.”
Again, as mentioned earlier, three years ago, the tension and stress were off the chart in Potter’s shop. However, the company’ subsequent commitment to investing in custom software and training changed everything. “Our software lets us control our production lineup and forecast what we can fit in,” Potter says. “I’m booking work two weeks in advance, so we’re preparing before orders even hit. It gives us visibility into where we have capacity and lets us adjust the schedule.”
Potter says he also makes a point of cross training his people in order to be able to move them “like a beehive” from department to department. “We had sales to the roof in 2025, but it was the easiest Christmas we’ve ever had,” he says.
Along these same lines, though a surge in holiday orders invariably puts more pressure on RushOrderTees’ schedule, Nichols says the shop already knows how it’s going to respond. “During the holidays, we build in extra production shifts and tighten our scheduling workflows, but the expectation internally is the same as it is in June,” Nichols says. “If we promised it, we deliver it.”
Central to this approach is RushOrderTees’ policy of ramping up its staffing well ahead of the actual rush, bringing on seasonal support and cross-training team members. “We know the cadence well enough to plan for it, but every year teaches us something new,” he says. “The key is having experienced people on the floor who can keep quality consistent when the pace picks up.”
Why Careful Blank Apparel and Materials Inventory Planning Is Required
As for inventory, as stated earlier, over at RushOrderTees, the company’s holiday planning begins months out, with the team making a point of stocking blank garments, inks and materials well before the rush itself. “The supply chain disruptions from a few years ago taught decorators to plan further ahead and maintain stronger supplier relationships,” Nichols says. “We’d rather carry extra stock than tell a customer we can’t fill their order because a blank is on backorder.”
That said, according to Chadwick, she’s still placing inventory orders daily as late as December. Since many of her vendors offer free freight at certain thresholds, she explains, the approach remains manageable.
At the same time, Chadwick says she makes a point of keeping at least one of every size S-2XL in multiple colors in stock. “When an item sells, we replace it immediately, which helps us [provide] quick turnaround times, often within a day,” she says.
As for Potter, he says his company keeps inventory levels hyper-stocked year-round based on sales data from years past. “We run the data analytics for 12 months, so we have the breakdown per size per month of what we’d normally go through,” he says. “We stay ahead of the game, so I’m always prepped.”
Employing the Right Systems Gets You Over the Line
Of course, all the stock in the world isn’t going to do your shop much good if you don’t have your production processes in shape. With this in mind, many of the shop owners I spoke to say they make a point of investing in a variety of internal systems designed to keep things running as smoothly as possible.
Potter, for example, says he developed his own unique company software system. He also invested in the all-in-one employee management app Connecteam. “It lets us track when people clock in and out and communicate across production without leaving our stations, so we’re not losing time going back and forth,” he says. “Between our software and how we’ve structured our processes, it keeps getting easier for us to do our jobs.”
In this same vein, RushOrderTees has made a point of beefing up its order management, production scheduling and real-time tracking systems. At the same time, Nichols emphasizes the technologies a company employs are only as good as the communications behind them. “Clear handoffs between our customer service team and the production floor are as important as any software. When someone calls in stressed about a deadline, we need to give them a confident answer, not ‘let me check and get back to you,’” he says.
As for USColorworks, McDonald says central to his company’s success is an emphasis on clear workflow visibility. “We rely heavily on structured production processes and systems that let us track orders from intake through production, shipping and fulfillment,” he says. “When the busy season hits, you have to know where every order stands and where the bottlenecks are developing.”
By way of extension, when it comes to selecting the decorating methods that work best during the holiday rush, it depends on the order. Over at RushOrderTees, for example, Nichols says screen printing remains the holiday workhorse for larger group orders, like the ones they get for major events and corporate clients. That said, the shop also sees a noticeable increase in embroidery for gifts like hats, polos and quarter-zips, while digital printing remains the go-to for smaller runs calling for full-color, photo-quality designs.
Finally, there’s the matter of customer service. No matter how crazy things get, it is important you company never forgets the people it is dealing with on the other end—or why it is you decided to become a custom apparel decorator in the first place.
By way of example, Nichols says his company once had one its larger corporate customers called on a Monday with an urgent 500-shirt request for a holiday event set to take place later that same week. “Our production team reorganized the schedule, ran an extra shift, and had the shirts boxed and shipped out by Wednesday,” he says. “A few days later, the customer sent us a photo with everyone wearing the shirts. That’s the kind of thing that reminds you why you do this work. It’s about showing up for someone when they need you.”
Similarly, Walnut Creek Apparel & Gifts hosts an annual “Holidazzle” event, where the store gets so busy it can become difficult if not impossible for her customers to find what they’re looking for. Chadwick, however, turned that into an opportunity by handing out coupons for customers they could then use the following week. “Many came back to shop in a more relaxed environment, and we still captured those sales,” she says.
“When we’re upfront and take ownership, customers are incredibly understanding,” Chadwick adds. “Our business relies heavily on word of mouth, so maintaining trust and integrity is essential.”
Nicole Rollender is an award-winning writer and heads the copywriting and content-creation firm STRANDWritingServices.com.
