Chinese New Year is the largest annual disruption in the manufacturing calendar, and the shutdown itself is the least of it. The official holiday is about a week. The practical disruption runs far longer in both directions, and importers who plan only around the official dates consistently get caught.
The date moves each year, falling somewhere between late January and mid-February, so plan by counting backwards from whenever it falls rather than by memorising a fixed month. Confirm the current year's date before you build a schedule around it.
Why it disrupts more than a week
A large share of factory workers are internal migrants who return home once a year, and this is that trip. The journey is long, so people leave early and come back late. Factories wind down before the official start and restart gradually afterwards, because they are waiting for their workforce to reassemble.
Two things follow. Capacity in the weeks before is heavily oversubscribed, because every customer is trying to ship before the shutdown. And a proportion of workers do not return at all — they take work elsewhere, or stay home. A line that restarts with a meaningful share of new staff is not the same line that made your last order, whatever the factory tells you.
The quality dip nobody warns you about
This is the part that costs money. In the final push before the shutdown, factories are running at maximum, staff are working long hours and thinking about their journey, and the pressure to finish is enormous. Attention to detail suffers in ways that are entirely predictable and rarely disclosed.
After the restart, the problem inverts. Experienced workers have been replaced by new ones who need training, and the first weeks of output often show defects that would not have appeared before the break. Both effects are real, both are well known inside the industry, and neither is something a supplier volunteers.
The practical consequence is that inspection matters more on either side of the holiday than at any other time of year. If you accept goods produced in the final week before shutdown without checking them, you are accepting the output of a tired line under maximum pressure.
A countdown that works in any year
Work backwards from the holiday date rather than from a calendar month.
| Roughly three months before | Place orders that must ship before the shutdown. Later than this and you are competing for capacity that is already committed. |
| Roughly two months before | Finalise samples and approvals. Nothing involving a new mould, a new fabric or a new certification should still be open after this point. |
| Roughly one month before | Production should be underway. Book inspection now, because inspection capacity is as oversubscribed as factory capacity. |
| Final two weeks | Inspect anything produced in this window without exception, and confirm bookings. Freight out of China tightens sharply here. |
| Holiday period | Assume no production, no responses and no shipping. Do not schedule decisions that need a supplier's input. |
| First weeks after | Expect a gradual restart rather than a resumption. Treat early post-holiday output as higher risk and inspect accordingly. |
What to do if you have missed the window
If it is already too late to ship before the shutdown, the worst response is to push the factory to compress the schedule. That produces exactly the quality problems described above, on your order specifically.
Better options, in rough order of preference: accept the delay and plan around it honestly; split the order so a smaller quantity ships now and the balance after the restart; or air freight a bridging quantity if the maths supports it. Each of these is a real trade-off with a visible cost, which is preferable to a hidden one.
Whatever you decide, get the revised schedule in writing with the post-holiday restart built into it, not a date that assumes the factory returns to full capacity on day one.
The deposit question
Be deliberate about payment timing around the holiday. A deposit paid immediately before a multi-week shutdown buys you a long period with money committed, no production visible and limited communication. That is not a reason to refuse, but it is a reason to have satisfied yourself about the supplier first, and to prefer milestones that sit either side of the break rather than straddling it.
This is also the season when payment fraud attempts rise, because the disruption gives a plausible reason for changed instructions and slow replies. Our payment security policy covers the verification rule we follow, and it applies with particular force at this time of year.
