What is the Têt (Lunar New Year) ?

The Tet, or Lunar New Year, is the Vietnamese equivalent of the Chinese New Year. It’s the equivalent of Christmas for many Asian nations on a much greater scale.
Since the date is based on the Lunar calendar, the exact date changes each year but it usually falls between mid-January to end of February. This is one of the many factors that adds to the confusion and planning troubles.

How long does it last?

The official government holiday is pretty much 1 week, however that number is far from relevant. Most factories would close down for a period of a least 2 weeks. Usually the office staff, which includes management, admin, sales etc is usually off for 2 weeks. Here at Gold Hats Headwear our entire sales team remains fully operational during the holidays.

That being said, without labor there is no production! Workers tend to leave for a much longer time, it might be hard to believe for westerners to hear about a month long leave, however it’s a standard as long as laborers are concerned.

Keeping in mind that this is the only time of the year they go back to their hometowns to visit their family, they definitely earned it!

We pride ourselves on treating our workers with the best of care which is why most of them only leave for 2 or 3 weeks. We also have an extremely high come-back-to-work rate, close to 80% when the national standard is more around 50%.

How am I concerned?

Starting at the end of the year, and especially 2 months before the holidays, we’re under huge pressure from our bigger partners to ensure that their custom hats are dispatched on time before the break. These partners tend to book entire production lines and sometimes the whole factory, which makes it very difficult for late coming smaller or new partners to book any production space before the holidays.

At the same time, everybody is working over-time to make sure that all the confirmed orders are completed on time so that they could earn the biggest bonus possible and go home with the maximum.

These two factors makes the perfect recipe for quality issues which is why quality control procedures are tighter than usual.

How can I prevent it?

By booking your orders as early as you can. This way your custom snapbacks, 5 panels, or baseball caps order will be secured and no matter what happens you’ll receive your hats before the holidays, giving you a huge advantage on competitors left short-supplied because they didn’t plan ahead.