We built a one-month buffer into our first production run. It's gone. Here's what ate it.
When you're making a physical product for the first time, everyone tells you to build in a buffer. We did. One full month. It's gone, and we haven't shipped yet.
Here's what the buffer actually absorbed:
A regional public holiday nobody flagged in advance - one week.
The Indigo network collapse - ten days.
An Iran conflict driving a fuel crunch that slowed our dyeing unit significantly.
And then the printer.
The first screen printer we worked with couldn't get our artwork right. Our illustrations aren't the standard flat vector graphics most garment printers deal with. They have texture. Raw edges. They were created specifically for this collection; hand-drawn, not production ready from the start. The first printer flattened everything that made them interesting. We moved to another printer who understood what we were trying to hold on to. The iterations took twenty days.
We're building a small-batch kids apparel brand. Our order quantities are nowhere near what these manufacturers typically run. That probably has something to do with how we get deprioritised when anything (a holiday, a fuel crunch, an airline going down) gives them a reason to shuffle the queue.
The vacation season window is gone. That's a real cost in kids wear. Summer holidays are a buying trigger and we're going to miss it for our first drop.
We had expected delays. That's what the buffer was for. Yet here we are, wondering if we could have done anything differently.
The definition of a buffer has changed. Forever.