Medal and shirt orders are separate purchase orders sent to separate vendors with separate artwork, separate production timelines, and separate shipping cutoffs. They also need to arrive at the same venue, on the same day, so that every finisher gets both. That's the trap.
Why these two orders are weirdly connected
A finisher package is a moment, not a pile of inventory. The runner crosses the line, someone hangs a medal around their neck, someone else hands them a shirt, and the whole experience lands at once. Break either half and the experience breaks.
The problem is that vendors don't talk to each other. Your medal supplier in China doesn't know who your screen printer in Ohio is. Your screen printer doesn't know your event date unless you tell them. Both will ship when they're done, on their own schedule, unless you've given them a hard arrival date and confirmed it in writing.
Medals and shirts also fail in different directions. A shirt order can be held up by a soft-hand ink issue or a last-minute size adjustment. A medal order gets held up by artwork revisions, sample shipping, or a Chinese national holiday nobody put on the calendar. Both failure modes are common. Both are preventable by the same tool: an honest, shared project timeline that treats these two orders as one coordinated project with two vendors.
How many months ahead should you order?
Twelve weeks is the floor, not the target. Custom medals, meaning anything with a custom die and your event artwork, typically run 8 to 10 weeks of production time plus 2 to 3 weeks for shipping from overseas suppliers. If you need a sample approved before production starts, which you should, add another 2 weeks minimum.
Custom shirts from a domestic screen printer run about 6 to 8 weeks for a straightforward design on a standard blank, plus a week or two for shipping. Rush options exist but often add 20 to 30 percent to your unit cost and still don't protect you if the rush window is already gone.
The math looks like this:
| Item | Artwork Approval | Production | Shipping | Total Minimum |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Custom medal (overseas) | 1–2 weeks | 8–10 weeks | 2–3 weeks | 11–15 weeks |
| Custom race shirt (domestic) | 1 week | 6–8 weeks | 1–2 weeks | 8–11 weeks |
The overlap in those ranges is narrow. If you're ordering 12 weeks out, you're already inside the medal supplier's comfortable window. Place both orders the same week. Don't let the shirt order wait because shirts feel easier, because they probably are easier, but they still eat time.
The custom medal artwork trap
Most first-time race directors spend a week or two longer than expected on medal artwork, and most experienced race directors have at least one story about a sample arriving wrong.
Artwork approval is a multi-step process, not a checkbox. You'll send your logo and event details to the medal vendor, they'll produce a line-art rendering of the die shape, you'll review it, you'll probably request changes, they'll revise, you'll approve, and then they'll send you a physical sample to confirm the finish quality and color accuracy. That sample ships from overseas, which takes another week or ten days to arrive. If the sample has problems, you repeat the loop.
Common sample surprises include the wrong metal finish (antique silver instead of bright), a recessed area that's shallower than it looked in the rendering, or a ribbon color that photographs beautifully but reads as muddy in person. None of these are rare. Factor in two rounds of revisions as a default, not a worst case.
The useful move here is to supply your vendor with a complete art brief on the first contact: exact text, logo file in vector format, die shape preference, finish type, ribbon color, and any spinner or insert details. Every piece of information you send upfront is a revision cycle you avoid later.
When one vendor ships early and the other doesn't
Medals arriving in July for a September race sounds like a nice problem. It isn't.
Early delivery creates a storage and logistics problem. Finisher medals for a mid-sized 5K might be 500 to 2,000 individual pieces, often packed in a box that fills half a car trunk. Someone has to store them somewhere dry and not-a-garage-that-floods, track them through an event coordinator's basement, and then transport them to the venue. Add shirts arriving two weeks late and now you're either handing out medals-only at the finish line or planning a second distribution event that costs you staff hours and postage.
Mailing shirts post-race is more common than it sounds, and it's more annoying than it sounds. Runners expect to wear their race shirt home. When they don't get it, you'll receive about forty emails asking where it is, and you'll have to pay shipping on several hundred packages you didn't budget for.
The reverse scenario is worse. Shirts arrive on time, medals are delayed. You can hand someone a shirt at the finish line and they feel fine. A finish line without medals feels genuinely incomplete. Runners who registered for a medal race and didn't get a medal do not quietly forgive you.
Recommended starting points
5 picksBuilding a coordinated timeline that actually works
Pull up one document. Put both vendors' contact names, order confirmation numbers, and promised ship dates on the same page. Every key deadline goes in one place, visible to whoever is managing event logistics on your end.
Lock approval dates before you lock anything else. The most common timeline failure isn't late shipping. It's that artwork approval took three weeks instead of one, which pushed production start, which pushed the ship date past the event. Set internal deadlines for your own approvals, not just vendor deadlines. If your medal artwork needs to be approved by a board or a sponsor, schedule that meeting before you start the process, not after the sample arrives.
A workable structure for a race 14 weeks out looks roughly like this: spend week one on both vendor briefs and deposit payments, spend weeks two through four on artwork review and sample requests for medals while simultaneously getting shirt proofs, approve all materials by week five, confirm production start with both vendors, then set a firm required-arrival date at four weeks before race day and put it in both vendor confirmations in writing.
Four weeks of buffer before race day sounds generous until you've had to scramble a volunteer to pick up boxes from a freight terminal on a Thursday night. The 5K Shirt-Size Calculator can help you nail down the shirt quantities before you finalize that order confirmation, which is one fewer variable to manage under deadline pressure.
Not sure how to sequence medal and shirt orders for your specific event date?
What size mix to order for each item
Medals are easy on this front. One size, one quantity. Order the number of finishers you expect, add a 10 to 15 percent buffer for finishers who drop out of their corral and still expect a medal, volunteers who traditionally receive them at many events, and the handful you'll inevitably drop in a muddy finish-line corral.
Shirts are a different inventory problem entirely, even though they ship to the same place.
Collect size data directly from registrants. If your registration platform (RunSignup, Race Roster, ACTIVE, and others all support this) captures a shirt size at sign-up, use it. Aggregate the responses, weight your order toward the distribution you see in the data, and add a buffer in your two or three most popular sizes. For most recreational 5K populations, that means extra medium and large. For a trail event with a heavier male-skewed field, your large and XL tail will be longer.
The practical issue is that registrants lie, or at least they register in April with one body in mind and show up in October with a slightly different one. Ordering an exact match to registration data with no buffer will leave you handing out XL to someone who wanted a medium. See the sibling article on how many shirts to order for a 5K for a full breakdown of overstock math by event type.
According to Gildan's published blank sizing specifications, their standard adult tees run true to size through XL and begin to vary at 2XL and above, which is worth confirming against your specific blank before committing to a size run that goes up to 4XL.
Treat the shirt size order and the medal quantity order as genuinely separate decisions, even if the final packing list puts them in the same boxes. The math is different, the buffer logic is different, and conflating them is how you end up with 400 medals and 380 shirts because someone subtracted the wrong number.
Start your medal and shirt orders on the same day, or plan to mail one of them to people's homes weeks after the race.