Is the Chinese New Year About to Wreck Your Production Schedule?

You’ve timed your launch perfectly, but a surprise factory shutdown for a Chinese holiday puts everything on hold. Your collection will miss its window, costing you sales and credibility.

I once had a new client, a very talented designer like Dean, place a big order right before the Lunar New Year. He thought production would just pause for a week and then restart. He didn’t understand that after the holiday, many workers travel for days to get home and, more importantly, a significant percentage don’t return to the same factory afterward. 

You expect a minor delay for a holiday. But the shutdown is longer than anticipated, and the factory takes even longer to ramp back up, completely derailing your production timeline and delivery dates.

The official dates of a holiday are misleading. The real impact is much longer. For a 7-day holiday like National Day (Golden Week), most workers travel back to their hometowns, some of which are hundreds of miles away. This means production starts slowing down 2-3 days before the holiday and takes another 2-3 days to get back to full speed.

The biggest holidays feel like unavoidable black holes in the production calendar. You feel helpless, forced to accept massive delays that disrupt your business every single year and ruin your delivery targets.

Treat major holidays like a hard deadline. Our entire production schedule is built around them. To navigate this, we establish clear cut-off dates for new orders. For example, to guarantee shipment before the Chinese New Year shutdown in February, you must confirm your order and have all materials in our factory by early December. This gives us the 6-8 weeks needed for production without getting caught in the pre-holiday rush where quality can suffer.

Fabric mills and trim suppliers also shut down. We work with you to ensure all raw materials are ordered and received long before they close. There is nothing worse than having your jeans 90% finished, only to be stuck waiting for buttons from a supplier who has already closed for the holiday.

The weeks before a major holiday are the most expensive and chaotic for shipping. Ports are congested and container space is limited. By finishing your production run early, we can book your freight well in advance, securing a spot and avoiding last-minute price gouging.

The factory is closed, and your contact goes silent. You have urgent questions about the shipping status of your order, but you’re met with an automatic email reply, leaving you anxious and in the dark.

We understand that you can’t be left in a black hole for weeks. Our protocol is built on transparency. In the final week before a major holiday closure, your account manager will send you a detailed Pre-Closure Briefing.

This email confirms the exact status of your order, includes copies of any shipping documents if your order has already departed, and provides the name and direct contact information (like a WeChat or WhatsApp number) of the designated emergency contact.

This person is typically a senior manager who monitors messages for critical issues, such as a problem with customs clearance. For non-urgent questions, we will respond as soon as the team is back online. This system ensures you have peace of mind and a lifeline if you really need it, while also allowing our team to take their much-needed holiday break.

A critical delivery deadline is fast approaching when you get an unexpected email: the factory is closing tomorrow for a three-day festival you’ve never heard of. It’s too late to adjust your plans.

Surprises are bad for business. That’s why we are extremely proactive about communicating our holiday schedule. Our system is designed to prevent any last-minute shocks.

Every January, we send all our clients our official factory holiday calendar for the entire year. This lists all the national and local holidays that will result in a full shutdown. We recommend you immediately put these dates into your own master planning calendar.

We don’t expect you to remember those dates. About 8 weeks before a major holiday like Golden Week or Chinese New Year, your account manager will send a reminder email. This email will restate the closure dates and, more importantly, specify the cut-off date for placing new orders to be completed before the holiday.

For our regular clients, we go one step further. We’ll schedule a brief call to personally discuss the upcoming holiday and how it integrates with your production needs for the next quarter. This allows us to work together to build a schedule that completely avoids any potential delays.

Holiday disruptions are predictable. With a transparent factory partner and proactive planning, you can navigate Chinese holidays smoothly and keep your production on track and on time every single year.