Once a year I have some version of the same call. A buyer placed an order in December, the confirmation said sixty days, and in February they want to know why the goods have not shipped. The answer is on every Chinese calendar, but it is invisible inside a lead-time number: Chinese New Year. After three decades of running production around it, here is the honest shape of the holiday from the factory floor, and the calendar that keeps an order out of its way.
The stop is wider than the holiday
The official Spring Festival holiday is about a week. No factory runs to that. Workers in furniture plants are mostly from other provinces, they travel far, and they take the trip seriously — so lines start thinning out one to two weeks before the date as people leave early, and they come back up over two to four weeks after, as people return (or do not). Treat the practical production gap as six to eight weeks, centred on a date that moves each year, landing anywhere from late January to mid-February.
The two edges of that gap fail differently, and the second one is worse.
The pre-CNY crunch: everyone wants to ship in the same month
Every buyer with stock arriving in Q1 wants their container on the water before the holiday. That compresses a quarter of demand into the last six working weeks of the year, with predictable results. Factory schedules fill early — the slots in the final two weeks go first, to the programs that booked them in October. Trucking and port handling tighten. Freight rates spike on the pre-CNY sailings, sometimes sharply, and the boxes themselves get scarce on popular lanes.
The quality risk is real too, and I will say it plainly because most factories will not: the riskiest goods of the year industry-wide are the ones forced through final assembly in the last frantic week before closure, by tired crews, against a vessel cut-off. We protect against that the boring way — we do not accept orders into a window we cannot finish properly, even when the buyer pushes. A confirmed order that ships late hurts once; a rushed defect across a container hurts for a year.
The post-CNY restart: the edge nobody budgets
Importers plan for the closure. The restart is what catches them. Production does not resume at full speed the Monday after the holiday — some workers return a week late, some take a job nearer home and never return, and replacements need training before their work is trustworthy. A line might be at half its normal output for two or three weeks after reopening. On top of that sits the order backlog from everything that could not ship before the holiday.
Two practical consequences. First, an order placed in January for "production after the holiday" is realistically a late-March or April shipment, not an early-March one. Second, the first batches off a restarted line carry elevated risk simply because hands are new — this is exactly when third-party inspection earns its fee, and we welcome it (our note on retail audits covers the people side of how a factory is judged; the post-CNY weeks are when those systems matter most).
One more restart detail buyers rarely see: components. A chair factory restarts when its suppliers restart, and the gas-lift plant, the fabric mill and the carton plant all have their own ramp curves. We pull critical components into the warehouse before the closure for any order scheduled into the recovery window, because a line at full strength still cannot build chairs around a missing mechanism. Ask your supplier whether they do the same — the answer tells you how many post-CNY springs they have been through.
The calendar that works
For goods that must be on shelf or in your warehouse in early Q2, the arithmetic runs backwards like this: arrival April means sailing February–March at the latest, which means production complete before the closure, which means the order confirmed and materials committed by late October or early November. Booking a pre-CNY slot in December is asking for whatever is left, at the year's worst freight rates.
For replenishment that can tolerate arrival from May onward, the smart move is the opposite: skip the scrum entirely. Confirm in January or February for production in the recovery window, ship on the post-CNY sailings when rates have settled, and let the buyers who fight over pre-holiday slots subsidise the carriers. Same chairs, calmer schedule, usually cheaper freight per cube — and on a multi-container program the cadence logic from our container planning guide applies doubly, because a rolling schedule can simply flow around the holiday instead of slamming into it.
What we do on our side
We publish our closure and restart dates to active customers months ahead, we are explicit about the last confirmable order date for pre-CNY shipment, and lead times quoted across the window include the gap — a sixty-day quote in December is a sixty-working-day reality, and we say so in the confirmation rather than let the calendar deliver the news. With five office-chair lines and six rocking-chair lines we have room to schedule around the holiday for programs that plan early; what nobody has is room for orders that arrive in mid-December wanting January shipment.
If your seating program touches the Q1 window, send your target arrival dates through the contact form or to [email protected] and we will map them against next year's holiday before you commit. The product side starts at our office chairs and rocking chairs, and our OEM programme builds the CNY gap into every schedule by default.