Every year, without fail, we receive messages in early February from buyers asking why their order has not moved. The answer is always the same, and it was always predictable.
Chinese New Year is the largest annual human migration on earth. Hundreds of millions of workers travel home, factories close, and the country's manufacturing capacity goes quiet for weeks. If you import from China, this single fact should shape your entire ordering calendar.
The date moves each year — it follows the lunar calendar and falls somewhere between late January and late February. But the pattern around it is remarkably consistent.
| Period | What it means for your order |
|---|---|
| 8–10 weeks before | Capacity starts filling. Booking now is comfortable. |
| 5–6 weeks before | Last realistic window to place an order that ships before the holiday. |
| 3–4 weeks before | Freight rates spike. Everyone is trying to ship at once. |
| 1–2 weeks before | Workers begin leaving. Quality drifts — this is real and well documented. |
| The holiday | Two to four weeks fully closed. Nothing moves. |
| 1–3 weeks after | Slow restart. Staff turnover means new hands on the line. |
| 4+ weeks after | Normal capacity resumes. |
Add it up: the practical disruption window is around eight weeks, not two.
The fortnight before the holiday is the single worst time to have goods in production. Workers are focused on leaving, factories are pushing to clear orders, and shortcuts appear.
Just as important is the period immediately after. Turnover at Chinese factories peaks after the holiday — a meaningful share of workers do not return, and their replacements are learning the line on your order.
If you must have production running in these windows, inspect more, not less. This is the one time of year we recommend in-line inspection even on repeat orders that normally would not need it.
In the three weeks before the holiday, every exporter in China is trying to ship. Space tightens, rates rise sharply, and rolled bookings — where your container is bumped to a later vessel — become common.
Then it inverts. In the two weeks after, ships sail half empty and rates fall. If your timing is flexible, this is a genuinely cheap window.
Work backwards from the holiday date, which you can look up a year ahead.
For buyers on a managed programme we book factory capacity months ahead and hold buffer stock in our Guangdong warehouse specifically to cover this window. It converts an annual disruption into a line item on a schedule.
For everyone else, the advice is simpler: find out the date, count backwards, and place the order six weeks earlier than feels necessary. It costs nothing and it saves a season.
Smaller, but worth knowing. National Day in early October closes factories for roughly a week and creates its own pre-holiday rush. Labour Day in early May is shorter but still disruptive. Qingming and Mid-Autumn cost a day or two each.
None of these approaches the scale of Chinese New Year, but stacked against a tight deadline they matter.
Send a photo, a drawing, a link or a sample reference on WhatsApp — you will have a considered reply, usually within one working day.
