PHOTOGRAPHED FROM OUR STOCK
The cloth behind these terms
Unretouched photographs from our own floor. Colour varies between dye lots; the swatch card is the only reliable reference.
BUYING SILK · 100% MULBERRY SILK · FROM A CHINESE MILL
Seven days is achievable — for stock. For a dye lot it is not, and here is why.
This page exists because 'fast delivery' claims are where buyers get misled. If you need silk in seven days, the honest answer is that it depends entirely on whether the colour already exists.
Stock colours dispatch in a few working days, so a seven-day door-to-door is realistic for air freight to most destinations. A custom colour cannot be done in seven days, because the sequence is lab dip, your approval, then dyeing and finishing — and the approval step is yours, not ours. Anyone promising a dyed-to-order lot in a week is either shipping stock and calling it custom, or skipping the dip.
The cloth is dyed, finished and inspected. Cutting and packing are the only steps left.
Dip, approval, dyeing, finishing, then dispatch. The dip and your sign-off are the unavoidable middle.
Strike-off, approval, then the print run. Same shape as dyeing with an extra step.
| Order type | Sequence | Realistic timing |
|---|---|---|
| Stock colour | Cut, pack, dispatch | A few working days, plus transit |
| Custom dyed colour | Lab dip, approval, dye, finish, dispatch | Weeks — the approval step is yours |
| Digital print | Strike-off, approval, print, finish, dispatch | Weeks |
| Woven to order | Loom setup, weave, dye, finish | Quoted against the structure |
The approval steps are yours and they are usually the longest part of the schedule. A dip that sits on a desk for a week adds a week, and no amount of expediting at the mill end recovers it. If a deadline is real, decide who can approve the dip and make sure they are available when it arrives.
Sequence matters. Sampling from stock, approving the dip, then running the bulk is faster end to end than compressing any single step, because each step de-risks the next. The slowest orders are almost always the ones where two steps were run in parallel to save time and one had to be redone.
These search phrases all land here because they mean the same thing:
If you were looking for a different commercial question, the wholesale page covers programmes and the ready-stock page covers what is on the shelf right now.
For a stock colour, yes — stock dispatches in a few working days and air freight to most destinations lands inside a week. For a custom colour, no: the lab dip and your approval sit in the middle of that timeline, and we will not skip the dip to hit a date.
No, and we would be wary of anyone who does for dyed goods. What we do is dispatch stock in a few working days and tell you the date on the quotation. Rush air freight can shorten transit; it cannot shorten dyeing.
Stock: a few working days. Dyed to order: the dip and approval first, then dyeing and finishing, quoted with a confirmed date. Printed: the strike-off first, then the run. The quotation carries the date for your quantity — we would rather quote longer and meet it.
Buy stock rather than dyeing, approve the dip the same day it arrives, and use air freight. Those three together are worth more than any expediting on the mill side.
Yes. Swatch cards and one-metre cuts are cut and posted promptly and travel by post, which is the fastest route for something that weighs almost nothing.
PHOTOGRAPHED FROM OUR STOCK
Unretouched photographs from our own floor. Colour varies between dye lots; the swatch card is the only reliable reference.
Tell us the quantity and the colour and we will quote it with a confirmed dispatch date.
