Wait Times

Wait Times for In Stock Items:

All in stock items will be shipped within 1 business day of receiving your order. If you place an order before 12 pm EST, it will normally be shipped out the same day. Your order will ship from Michigan via UPS. Depending on how close you live to Michigan, your item(s) will probably spend 1-5 days in transit. However, please keep in mind that we have no control over how long UPS takes / if there are any delays.

Wait Times for Backordered Small Items:

(Any item other than Custom Bitesuits or Covers): We will ship your backorder as soon as we receive it from Belgium. This can take anywhere from a week to a few months from the time you place your backorder, depending on when we last received a shipment from Belgium.

Wait Times for Bitesuits:

First of all, to answer the easy question: WE DO NOT OFFER ANY SORT OF RUSH PROCESSING. Seynaeve makes the suits in basically the order in which the completed, detailed orders are received. We understand that other bitesuit manufacturers offer rush processing for a fee, but that is not something we are able to do.

It’s never possible for us to provide a statement about wait times that gives customers an accurate idea of how long they will be waiting for their suit, so we try to be conservative in our estimates. We feel like it’s better to have a customer expect to wait for the long end of the spectrum of wait times and be pleasantly surprised if his or her suit arrives sooner than that.

The reason we can’t be accurate about our wait times is that there are too many variables that impact them, as follows:

-Our bitesuits are hand tailored to order by basically one man in Belgium, who creates the patterns for your measurements and cuts most of them out himself. He has a few people who he trusts to stitch the bitesuits, but very few. For this reason, production capacity is strictly limited. There is no aspect of our bitesuit production that is “mass-production,” or that can be automated to increase production capacity. People who have had custom made Seynaeve bitesuits, and bitesuits from other manufacturers understand the difference this makes.

-Our shipments come over from Belgium in intervals that normally happen every couple of months. Orders for bitesuits are received at different times within that cycle of shipments – If a bitesuit order is received into the system in a time that it becomes one of the last items added into a shipment, then the wait time for that bitesuit is a bit shorter. Conversely, if it is one of the first items included in a shipment, the wait time for that bitesuit will be a bit longer. This variable is unavoidable.

-Wait times do vary throughout the year by the cycle of demand for bitesuits. Basically, the high-demand busy time when lots of orders are coming in, runs from late winter/early spring (Northern Hemisphere), to mid-summer. The orders that come in during this time of the year can experience wait times that are on the longer end of the spectrum. On the other hand, normally orders that come in throughout the fall and early winter tend to experience shorter wait times simply due to reduced demand.

-Historically our customers have experienced an average wait time of about 3 months. However, due to ever-increasing demand has been increasing for Seynaeve bitesuits, and production capacity that is strictly limited by the fact that nearly all of the suits are laid out, and the patterns are created by one man, with only a few people trusted to stitch them, wait times have increased over the past year or two.

The summary of the effect from all of these factors is that wait times are never terribly accurate, due to these variables, but we strive to provide as much transparency as possible. Since we would rather estimate conservatively and have people expect a longer wait time and then receive their suit sooner than expected, our projections of likely wait times range from 3 months during some parts of the year, to around 6 months when the perfect storm of wait time factors occurs. Every once in a while, someone may luck out and have a wait time less than 3 months, but it is not something that should be expected.

Please accept our apologies that we aren’t able to offer an accurate answer about wait times for bitesuits, but be assured that we can give you detailed, quality answers to the questions you will have about the other attributes of our bitesuits.