Guaranteed Delivery Dates on Promotional Products
Learn about our guaranteed delivery dates for promotional products, ensuring timely receipt to match your event...
Learn about our guaranteed delivery dates for promotional products, ensuring timely receipt to match your event schedule efficiently.
We'll deliver your order on or before the guaranteed delivery date shown. That date sits on every product page on hotline.co.uk, and it's an actual date rather than a number of working days for you to count forward yourself. Dispatch across our range runs from 5 days on a screen printed canvas tote to 22 days on a full colour bamboo fan, so the date you see reflects the product you've chosen.
Pick a canvas tote and the page gives you one date. Pick a hoodie and it gives you another, roughly a week later. Both are there before you've uploaded a logo or spoken to anyone.
Why a date and not a lead time
Most of this industry quotes lead times as a range of working days, usually something like seven to ten working days or two to three weeks. Those are honest enough as far as they go, and they leave you doing arithmetic you shouldn't have to do, on a calendar that probably includes a bank holiday you've forgotten about, to work out whether your merchandise beats your event.
We do that calculation and publish the answer. If your exhibition opens on the 26th and the page says Thursday the 20th, you have what you need without opening a calculator. The difference matters most when the deadline is tight. A range of working days tells you what's probably fine. A date tells you what's booked.
Why two products show different dates
Each product carries its own dispatch figure, and the date on the page is worked forward from that. The spread across our catalogue is wider than most people expect.
| Product | Dispatch | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Deluxe 10oz canvas tote | 5 days | Screen printed, held in depth, simple branding |
| Branded Love Hearts | 7 days | Printed label applied to a stocked product |
| Moleskine Classic Notebook | 8 days | Screen printed onto a finished retail item |
| Urban Women's Hoodie | 10 days | Garment branding, size-dependent picking |
| Parker IM Core Rollerball Pen | 10 days | Pad printed onto a precision surface |
| Full Colour Bamboo Fan | 22 days | Full colour print across a large area |
Nothing about looking at those six products would tell you which is which, which is exactly why the date goes on the page rather than in a quote you have to ask for.
Ordering to a fixed event date
If you're buying for an exhibition, a conference, a launch or a staff event, work backwards from the date you need boxes on site rather than from the date of the event itself.
For an exhibition that means the build day rather than the opening. For a conference with a venue delivery, add a day and check that somebody will be there to sign for it. Venues are not always willing to hold deliveries, and a pallet of tote bags turning up on a Saturday to a locked loading bay helps nobody.
Then check the date on the product page against yours. If it doesn't work, tell us your date and we'll tell you what does. Some products can move faster than their standard date and some can't, and we would much rather say no on the phone in August than miss a date you've built an event around in October.
If you'd rather start from your date than from a product, you can set the date you need and see only the products that can meet it. That's covered in shopping by delivery date. You can also browse express products if your deadline is close.
Where the clock starts
Your guaranteed date depends on one thing you control, which is how quickly you approve your proof.
Nothing goes into production until you've signed off your Visual Proof™, and you'll normally have that back within 20 minutes during working hours. If it then sits in an inbox for three days waiting for somebody to look at it, that's three days off your timeline. The single most useful thing you can do on a deadline-driven order is decide in advance who approves the proof and tell them it's coming.
What our delivery promise actually means
We deliver 99.9% of orders on time. That number exists because a guaranteed date is a commitment we plan production against rather than a forecast we hope holds. If something does go wrong, we'd rather you heard it from us first, with a new date and what we're doing about it. We would rather have an awkward phone call on the Tuesday than an unhappy customer on the Friday.
Separately, if what arrives doesn't match the Visual Proof you approved, we'll replace it or refund it.