Not more than 10 years ago an average delivery time for promotional products in Europe was minimum 4 weeks.
Artwork was sent on CD or other physical supports by post and it took near a week to get an approval on the artwork.
In the USA it changed already a couple of years ag and now companies like Magnet LLC or Prime are able to ship your custom order within 1 or 2 days.
You would expect that in such companies everybody is running to get the orders through the order and production process ? Well, I was really astonished when i visited both companies a couple of years ago, in fact nobody is running it’s simply a perfect organisation with logical steps through which the orders are going.
Today this has changed a lot in Europe too, although I do not believe that we have many importers or manufacturers able to ship a custom job within 2 days.
But the presure is higher and higher to reduce the production time. Our sales departement get’s inquiries each days for extremely short deliverytimes.
I really believe that the future in the european market belongs to those companies who will be able to deliver in shortest time.
Delivery time becomes even more important than cost.