← All posts

Freight

The January stock gap, and why the order is due in November

Black Friday empties the shelf and Christmas finishes the job. The container that refills it has to be booked while the warehouse still looks comfortably full.

Marcus VolstedCo-founder, Restocio Published 11 September 2026Updated 11 September 20269 min read

Every source on this page was opened and read, and each one is dated in the Sources section at the foot.

The order that refills your shelf in January has to be placed in early November, roughly three weeks before the Black Friday weekend that empties it. Your Q4 stock was bought in August, landed in October, and is already committed to parcels you have not packed yet. Behind it there is nothing on the water unless somebody booked it.

That second order is the one with no owner. The Black Friday order has a date everybody feels, and our own Black Friday planning post counts backward to 27 November and stops there, like every other page in this category. Its January section covers the opposite failure, the surplus that did not sell. This page is about the hole next to it, on the products that did.

Why does a full warehouse in late November mean nothing?

Because what you are looking at is a picking queue. Most of what is stacked in the last week of November is spoken for by orders placed that weekend, and the part that is not is leaving at a pace you never see in an ordinary month.

Take a product that sells 10 units a day in October and 40 a day across the discount weekend. Six hundred units is 60 days of stock at the October rate and 15 days at the weekend's rate, and the pile on the floor looks identical either way. A full shelf and an expired deadline are the same picture, which is the point our replenishment guide is built around.

Then look behind the shelf, where nothing is moving. Sea freight on our own default runs 70 days door to door. An order placed on the Monday after Black Friday, 30 November, lands around 8 February, two days after Chinese New Year.

When do you order the stock that refills January?

Early November if your factory ships from stock, early October if the goods have to be made first. That is for goods sellable in the first week of January on an Asia to Europe sea lane, worked backward one lead-time segment at a time. These are shapes, not quotes, and your forwarder's dates beat them every time.

That comes to 65 days, and our own door to door default of 70 moves it to 30 October. Both answers sit before Black Friday. If your lane is routed around the Cape of Good Hope, Forto's estimate of 10 to 15 extra days, published 13 May 2026, pulls every row another fortnight earlier.

Every date in the table is also the latest possible one, with no margin at all. Schedule reliability across the industry was 62.6% in June 2026, and vessels that arrived late did so by an average of 5.31 days, per Sea-Intelligence's Global Liner Performance report issue 179, 27 July 2026. The vessel alone misses its schedule more than a third of the time, before customs has had a say.

Why is it too late to reorder in January?

Because in 2027 the January gap runs straight into the factory closing. Chinese New Year 2027 falls on Saturday 6 February, published by the Hong Kong government on 15 May 2026, and production starts slowing weeks before the date itself.

SEKO Logistics, writing on 6 August 2026, puts the pre-holiday slowdown at 9 to 16 January 2027 and the full shutdown at 30 January to 14 February. The same guide advises booking vessel space four to five weeks ahead during that peak, and says booking for January and February shipments begins in October and November 2026.

Put those next to each other. The week most stores notice the gap is the week SEKO's slowdown begins. So the January refill and the Chinese New Year order are really one order, placed in the autumn, and what separates them is quantity rather than timing. How many extra units the closure is worth is worked out in our Chinese New Year 2027 post, which turns the closure into days and the days into units.

How long does the gap actually last?

Found in January, a gap on made-to-order goods lasts until about May. That is four months of an empty best seller, which is why this is worth ten minutes in September.

Say you spot the empty shelf on Monday 11 January 2027 and email the supplier that afternoon. Production is already winding down, and SEKO does not expect full capacity back until somewhere between 6 and 20 March. So the goods get made in March, sail at the end of it, spend around 40 days at sea and another week or two clearing customs and reaching your shelf. That lands in May, and a plane cannot shorten it, because production sits ahead of every route.

The January sales rate is mostly made of December

One more trap waits inside the recovery. Most trailing sales rates look back 60 days, ours included. Open your numbers on 8 January and that window starts in the second week of November, so it is built almost entirely from Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the Christmas run.

If your Q4 was a real peak, every product now looks faster than it is, days of stock reads short, and an order placed in that mood is sized for a rush that ended a fortnight ago. The error runs the opposite way to the one you were just burned by, which is exactly why it catches people. A 60 day window does not stop containing Christmas until late February. Until then, compare it against the same weeks last year rather than against last month.

What this looks like in Restocio

Two things in the app are aimed at this. The first is the order deadline, a countdown in days. It takes a product's days of stock and subtracts the whole lead time, meaning the sea crossing, the safety days and the supplier's production days, so it keeps moving on a day when nothing sold. On our defaults it fires while a product still has about 130 days of cover, which feels absurd in late November and is the entire point. When it fires, the order is sized on the stock you will have the day the boat lands, not on the pile you can see today, and the replenishment guide walks through why that number comes out larger.

The second is a season, set per product. Give a Christmas-only product its months and, in January, it leaves the order list with the reason shown on screen rather than being reordered off a December rate. A year-round product whose December was merely busy gets no such protection, which is the trap in the section above.

What we cannot see from here

Everything the app knows comes from your own sales and the lead times on your suppliers. A factory's real closing and reopening dates are in neither, so the 2027 dates on this page are published estimates, and the only dates that count are the ones your factory confirms in writing. Nothing in the app holds a holiday calendar per supplier today, so the closure has to go into that supplier's production days by hand for the cycle that spans it.

And duty is not yet inside our unit landed cost. Any cash figure attached to these orders is short by whatever your goods attract at the border, and autumn is when that hurts most, because several months of purchasing leave the bank as one payment.

Common questions

When should I order stock to refill after Black Friday?

For sea freight from Asia, early November if your supplier ships from stock. Counting backward from a shelf date of 8 January 2027, order confirmation, sailing, customs and putaway come to about 65 days, which lands on 4 November. If the goods have to be produced first, add the production run on top, which moves it to early October for a 30 day run. Both dates sit before Black Friday rather than after it.

Why is my warehouse empty in January?

Because the Q4 order and the January order are two different purchases and only one of them has a date everybody remembers. Q4 stock is usually bought in August, lands in October and is sized to sell through by Christmas. The refill behind it has its own deadline in early November, and an order placed in December on a 70 day sea lead time cannot land before February.

Can I reorder in January if I run out?

In 2027, mostly no. Chinese New Year falls on 6 February, and SEKO Logistics puts the pre-holiday slowdown at 9 to 16 January, full shutdown from 30 January to 14 February, and full capacity back only between 6 and 20 March. An order for made-to-order goods placed in mid January realistically gets produced in March and reaches your shelf around May.

Does leftover Black Friday stock cover January?

Only on the products you did not need it for. What survives the weekend is what did not sell, and what you are short of in January is what sold through, so the surplus and the gap sit on different products. Treating them as one number is how a store ends up holding dead stock and missing sales in the same month.

Why does my sales rate look so high in early January?

Because a 60 day trailing window opened in January starts in the second week of November, so it is made almost entirely of Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas. If your Q4 was a real peak, products look faster than they are and days of stock reads shorter than it is. The window keeps containing Christmas until late February, so compare against the same weeks last year until then.

Should I just order extra in August to cover January too?

It is an option and it is not free. One larger autumn order removes a deadline and replaces it with several months of stock paid for at once, long before most of it sells. Splitting it into a Q4 order and a January refill costs one more shipment and keeps the cash in the bank longer. Which is right depends on your cash position rather than on a rule.

Sources

Every source below was opened and read on the date shown against it. Rules, rates and schedules change, so check the current page before you act on a number that matters. If anything here is out of date or wrong, tell us and we will correct it.

• Hong Kong SAR Government, General holidays for 2027 published (15 May 2026) (read 11 September 2026)
• SEKO Logistics, Lunar New Year supply chain planning guide for Asia sourcing (6 August 2026) (read 11 September 2026)
• Forto, Shipping from China to Europe in 2026 (13 May 2026) (read 11 September 2026)
• Sea-Intelligence, Global Liner Performance report issue 179 (27 July 2026) (read 11 September 2026)

Marcus Volsted

Co-founder, Restocio

Marcus co-founded Restocio and works on it daily with a Swedish importer who plans their purchasing in it every working day. Restocio is built in Sweden by two founders, one Swedish and one Danish, and Marcus is the Danish one. Why we are building it.

Related reading

• How much extra stock to order before Chinese New Year 2027
• Black Friday inventory planning, counted backward
• Supplier lead time, and why yours is probably too short
• Shopify replenishment, end to end