Weeks 1–2: brief and factory shortlist
You share your spec, target price and volume; the agent assembles a shortlist of matching factories and comes back with feasibility, rough pricing, and a recommended path — the first real checkpoint where you confirm the project is viable as specified.
Weeks 2–5: sampling and factory selection
Samples are commissioned, produced and shipped for your review — this stage often takes the longest of the early process, and is worth not rushing, since it's the main opportunity to catch a mismatch before committing to bulk production.
Weeks 5–10: production
Once a sample is approved and the order confirmed, production begins — the agent is managing factory communication and progress tracking during this stage, with a pre-production inspection happening early and a mid-line check partway through.
Weeks 9–11: inspection and consolidation
As production nears completion, pre-shipment inspection happens, and if your order spans multiple factories, goods are consolidated into a single shipment at this stage — this is typically when you receive your first full inspection report with photos.
Weeks 10–16+: freight and delivery
Export customs clearance, ocean freight, and destination customs clearance follow — total time varies significantly by destination market, with Vietnam landing fastest and Indonesia typically taking longest among the markets we ship to.
What you are actually waiting on at each stage
Most schedule slippage comes from a small number of predictable causes rather than anything going badly wrong. Sampling is the usual one: factories are busy, and a sample that has been deprioritised in favour of a paying order can sit for two weeks without anyone considering it a delay. Approving the sample is the second — it needs a decision, and that decision needs you, which means it cannot be compressed by anyone in China. Production itself rarely runs late for long unless the order was never properly scheduled in the first place.
Knowing which stage holds the risk makes it much easier to ask about it. "How long is the sample lead time, and is our slot confirmed?" is a useful question. "How is production going?" is not, because the answer will be reassuring either way.
Where the two ends of the timeline meet
The dates at the front and the back of this schedule are the ones worth planning around. Chinese New Year typically shuts factories for two to four weeks depending on how far the date falls, and the surrounding weeks are when order books are fullest. On the destination side, clearance and final delivery are outside your control to a surprising degree, and differ considerably by market. Building a schedule with buffer at both ends is cheaper than any other way of recovering time when one of them moves.
A useful discipline is to work backwards from a required delivery date, confirm the latest workable order date, and treat that date as real rather than as a target. Buyers who treat the forward schedule as fixed and build the buffer in afterwards tend to be the ones caught out when a factory's slot slips by two weeks and there was no room left for it.