How Long Made to Order Takes and Why

Made to order means the design exists and the object does not. Between your order and your delivery there is a build, and the honest number for that build is three to five weeks before transit.

What the weeks are actually spent on

Very little of a lead time is work. Most of it is waiting for materials to behave.

Settling the specification. Days, sometimes an hour. On the Two-Seat Sofa there is a wool colour to choose from five. Until that is fixed, nothing downstream can start, because the frame and the covers are scheduled together.

Cutting and forming. Fast and predictable. Steel is cut, folded and jigged. This is the part of the process that looks like work in photographs and takes the least time.

Welding and cleaning up. Slower than it looks, because the grinding and dressing after a weld takes longer than the weld. Every seam that will sit under a clear coat has to be finished before it goes anywhere near a booth.

Coating. Powder coat is sprayed and then baked, which fuses it. That bake is short. What follows it is not: a coated part has to come back to room temperature before it can be handled, masked or assembled without marking.

Art, where there is art. Sprayed work is layered, and each layer has to flash off before the next one. Then a clear coat goes over the top, and that clear coat is the slowest single step in the building.

Curing. Not drying. A finish is touch-dry in hours and fully cured in days to weeks. In that window it is soft enough to take a fingerprint from a strap or a mark from a packing blanket.

Assembly, inspection, packing. A day, usually less.

Why curing is the part that cannot move

This is the single most useful thing to understand about a workshop lead time. Cutting can be resequenced, welding can run in the evening, a second pair of hands can speed up assembly. Curing is chemistry and it ignores all of that.

A clear coat forced into service early does not catch up later. It stays slightly softer for the rest of its life, which shows up as fingernail marks a year after delivery and as a surface that scuffs where an identical piece would not. The three to five weeks exist mostly to protect the part of the piece you will touch every day.

Temperature and humidity move curing times, which is where the two-week spread comes from. A cold, damp workshop week is a slow week. The range is a real range, not a padded one.

Transit on top

Leaving the workshop is not arriving. A small piece on a courier network moves quickly. A 48 kg sofa or an 84 kg bench goes on a pallet, and pallet networks run on their own schedule with a delivery window agreed by phone.

Plan on the build plus transit. If a piece has to be in a room for a specific date, work backwards from that date and add a fortnight of slack. See giving one-off furniture as a gift for how to handle a hard deadline.

What makes an order slower than it needed to be

• An unanswered question. If the workshop asks something and the answer takes a week, the order waits a week. Queue position is held by a settled specification, not by a payment.
• A changed mind after cutting. Once material is cut for your order it cannot be uncut. A colour change at that point restarts the coating sequence.
• An address that cannot take a pallet. Worth sorting out at order time rather than at delivery. Measure the doorway and stairwell first.

Stock pieces are a different promise

In stock means the object is finished and sitting in the workshop. The Stool No. 1, the Concrete Bench, the Round Table, the Side Shelf and the Drum Table are stock pieces. They ship within a week because the slow chemistry already happened, weeks ago, on a shelf.

If the date matters more than the configuration, buy from stock. The difference between the two is covered in what made to order actually means.

Reality check

• Three to five weeks is build time. Transit is extra and depends on the pallet network.
• Curing is the long pole and no amount of money moves it.
• The clock starts when the specification is settled, not when you pay.
• A rushed finish is a worse finish, permanently, not temporarily.
• If a date is fixed, buy stock or order with a fortnight of slack.