Buyers want one number: how long, and how many minimum. We can give ranges, but anyone who hands you a fixed lead time before asking about tooling, testing and timing of year is guessing. Here is how the weeks actually stack up, and what makes them grow.
The pieces of a lead time
A first order is the sum of stages, not a single clock. Sample development typically runs one to three weeks depending on how custom it is. If you need new tooling — a unique base or armrest mold — add weeks on top, because a mold is built, tested and adjusted before it makes a sellable part. Mass production then scales with volume and with the season. The piece buyers forget is testing: if your customer needs a BIFMA or EN report, that lab time is calendar time, and we book it at the sample stage so it overlaps rather than tacking on at the end.
What inflates it
Three things blow up a schedule. First, sample churn — every change after the first sample resets part of the clock, so locking the spec early is the cheapest speed you can buy. Second, custom tooling, which is unavoidable for true OEM but skippable if you start from an existing ODM platform. Third, season: the weeks around Chinese New Year and the pre-holiday peak tighten capacity across the whole region, and a quote that is realistic in May is optimistic in December. We will tell you if your timeline lands in a crunch.
About MOQ
MOQ is not a wall, it is a cost curve. A smaller run is possible on a standard task-chair platform with your fabric and logo, because there is no tooling to amortize. The moment you want a custom mold, the MOQ jumps — not because we are being difficult, but because a mold spread over 300 chairs makes each one expensive, and over 3,000 it disappears into the unit price. The trade-off is concrete: a low first order to test your market costs more per chair; committing volume up front buys a lower unit cost and a tooling investment that pays back. Neither is wrong; they are different bets.
Planning your cadence
The buyers who get the best prices from us are not the ones who haggle hardest — they are the ones who give us a forecast. If we know a reorder is coming, we can plan materials and slot production, which protects your lead time on the next round. A blind reorder in peak season waits in the same queue as everyone else. Tell us your annual volume even roughly and we will plan around it.
Send your models, target quantity and the date you need goods on the water, and we will give you an honest stage-by-stage timeline rather than a marketing number. Reach us at the contact form or [email protected].