Peak season does not reward effort. It rewards decisions made in September, when there is time to make them.
Know your capacity as a number
Not "we're pretty busy". A weekly ceiling in the unit your presses actually consume: impressions for screen, prints for DTG, stitches for embroidery, sheets for transfers.
weekly capacity = productive hours x realistic rate per hour
Productive hours means press-running hours, after setups, breaks, meetings and the inevitable interruptions. Most shops are shocked at how much smaller this is than their opening hours. That number is your promise ceiling, and every date you quote past it is a date you are hoping about.
Publish a hard cut-off, then honour it
Work backwards from your dispatch deadline:
| Step | Time |
|---|---|
| Carrier deadline for guaranteed delivery | Fixed date |
| Pack and QC | 1 day |
| Production at peak rate | 5 to 10 days |
| Artwork and setup | 1 to 2 days |
| Blanks in | 3 to 10 days |
| Approval | 1 to 3 days |
| Buffer | 5 days |
Add it up honestly and the cut-off is usually a fortnight earlier than shops like to admit. Publishing the honest date costs you a few late orders. Publishing an optimistic one costs you the reputation you spend the rest of the year earning.
Sequence by setup, not only by date
In normal months, first-in-first-out is fine. At peak, changeover is your enemy. Group jobs that share ink colours, screens, garment colours or hoop setups, then sequence those groups against due dates. Shops that do this find hours a week that were previously spent washing screens.
The constraint: never let sequencing push a job past its promised date. Group within slack, not across it.
Decide your no in advance
Write down, before it starts, what you will decline in peak:
- New customers below a certain order value.
- Designs above a colour count you cannot run efficiently.
- Anything needing a blank you do not stock and cannot get in time.
- Sample and one-off work, deferred to January.
Deciding this in September is a policy. Deciding it in November is a panic, and it will be inconsistent.
Where extra hands actually help
Around the skilled work, not in it. Folding, counting, boxing, labelling, and running blanks are all trainable in an hour and all steal time from your best operators. See hiring your second printer for the permanent version of this decision.
Protect the January bill
Peak season profitability is destroyed by two things: overtime you did not price, and rush jobs you took at standard rates. Your rush fee structure is what stands between a busy December and a profitable one.
Put a number on overtime before you promise anything
Overtime is the default answer to peak demand and the least examined one. At time and a half, an hour of press labour that normally costs £26 costs £39, and the tenth hour of a long day is not as productive as the second. A shop running 25 percent overtime through November is paying roughly 12 percent more for its labour across the whole month and getting less per hour than it thinks.
| Scenario | Labour cost per hour | Realistic output |
|---|---|---|
| Normal shift | £26 | Baseline |
| Overtime, first 2 hours | £39 | 90 to 95% of baseline |
| Overtime, beyond 2 hours | £39 | 70 to 85% of baseline |
| Sixth consecutive day | £39 | 65 to 80%, error rate up |
The practical consequence: overtime is a fine tool for a week and a bad strategy for a season. Priced into your rush fees rather than absorbed, it is sustainable. Absorbed, it converts your best revenue month into your worst margin month.
Measure peak while it happens, not in January
The reason shops repeat the same bad November is that by the time the accounts are done, nobody remembers which jobs were the problem. Recording hours against jobs fixes that with no analysis effort: staff clock on and off at the station, and the job costing report shows margin after labour by day and by job, plus the jobs that consumed the most hours.
What that report reliably reveals about peak season:
- The rush jobs you accepted late cost more than the fee covered. Almost always, because the disruption cost lands on the jobs either side of them.
- The big account you cleared the schedule for had the worst margin per hour. Volume discounts plus peak labour rates is a bad combination.
- Repeat work with existing screens and digitised files carried the season. Which is the argument for building more of it during the quiet months.
Sequence with setup families
Sequencing by due date alone is what fills a week with changeovers. Group by what the press has to change: ink colour families, mesh, garment colour, decoration method. A day of dark-garment screen work with a settled flash beats a day of alternating lights and darks, even if the due dates say otherwise.
The rule that survives contact with reality: sequence within the week by setup family, and across the week by due date. Anything genuinely urgent breaks the pattern and pays a rush fee for the privilege, because it is buying disruption, not just time.
Build the quiet months so peak is smaller
The real answer to a brutal November is a busier March. Recurring work from clubs, schools and corporate programmes flattens the year, and it is won in the off-season: recurring revenue from schools and clubs and group-buy campaigns both aim at the same problem. A shop with 40 percent of its year in repeat contract work has a peak season it can staff for. A shop that lives on one-off retail work has a lottery every autumn.
Printer's Friend shows committed work against your production window on the production board, so the week that is already full looks full before you promise it. For the numbers to watch while it happens, see print shop KPIs.