When to Order Christmas & Halloween Craft Collections

1. The reverse-planned calendar

Peak-season note: August–October is the industry’s busiest production window. Custom work booked then runs slower than the same job in spring — one more reason to sample early.

2. Sea vs air — the real trade-off

• Sea: 25–40 days port-to-port plus customs; the economical default for planned seasonal stock.
• Air: 5–10 days door-to-door; typically 3–6× the cost per kg — the tool for top-ups and missed deadlines, not for base stock.
• Split shipments: a common pattern is 70% by sea early + 30% by air as a reactive top-up once early sales data lands.

3. Sample one season ahead

The lowest-risk seasonal strategy: order a small themed sample pack a full season early (Christmas samples in spring), shoot your product photos, list a limited batch, and use real sell-through to size the bulk order. Stock holiday mixes — candy canes, snowflakes, gingerbread, pumpkins, ghosts, hearts — are always faster to reorder than custom shapes; browse the seasonal collections for current themes.

3b. Build the freight lead time into the calendar

Most seasonal plans fail on transit, not on production. Sea freight is the cheap option and the slow one; air is the reverse. Which one you can afford depends partly on how your quotation is written — the Incoterms® rules published by the ICC (current edition Incoterms® 2020) define whether the seller has already covered freight to a named point or whether that cost and that time sit with you.

Two habits that keep a season on track:

• Work backwards from the shelf date, not forwards from the order date. Retail launch, minus local repack, minus customs clearance, minus transit, minus production, minus sample approval — that is your order date.
• Ask for carton dimensions early. Seasonal goods are bulky, freight is billed on volume, and knowing the cubic volume is what lets a forwarder quote you sea versus air with real numbers instead of guesses.

Leave slack for clearance as well as transit. Classification sits with the importer in most jurisdictions, and the six-digit Harmonized System code is extended to ten digits nationally — so a themed assortment that mixes materials can need more than one line on the entry. Sorting that out in October for a December launch is a different experience from sorting it out in July.

4. What sells, per season

• Christmas: candy cane, gingerbread man, snowflake, tree, Santa hat; red–green–white and pastel “kawaii Christmas” both perform.
• Halloween: pumpkin, ghost, bat, skull, candy corn; purple–orange–black. The #2 craft season and growing.
• Valentine: hearts in every size, roses, lips; pink–red gradients. Short, intense selling window.
• Summer: citrus slices, shells, ice cream, starfish — the season where fruit slice mixes peak.