Clothing Manufacturer for Startups

One hundred pieces per style, per colour — deliberately low, because the standard industry floor of five hundred or a thousand is what stops most new brands before they start. A realistic first order is three to five hundred pieces across two or three styles, which is enough to photograph properly, sell through a launch, and learn something about demand without tying up capital in stock you cannot move. The advice we give most often is to go narrow and deep rather than wide and shallow. A hundred each of five styles costs considerably more per unit than five hundred of two, and it leaves you with five weak signals instead of two strong ones when it comes time to reorder.

You send a sketch, a reference garment or a tech pack, plus your fabric and quantity thoughts. We quote, and if it works you pay a sampling fee. We make a first sample in roughly ten days and courier it to you. You fit it, comment, and we revise — most brands need one or two rounds. When you approve a pre-production sample, that physical garment becomes the reference for everything after. You pay a deposit, we buy fabric and trims, and bulk production runs forty to fifty days. Before shipping we inspect against the agreed AQL standard and send you the report. You pay the balance, we ship DDP and handle customs and duty, and the goods arrive at your address. Reorders skip the sampling and are faster.

No, and this stops more first-time founders than almost anything else. A clear sketch, a reference garment whose fit you like, and a note on the fabric weight and feel you are after is enough for us to produce an accurate first sample. Measurements taken from a physical garment you own beat any description, and sending one is the single most useful thing you can do. We build the technical detail with you during sampling — that is where a manufacturer's input is worth most anyway, because we know what is straightforward to sew and what quietly adds cost. If you would like a tech pack for your own records or for future suppliers, we will produce one from the approved sample at no charge.

Fabric, then approvals, in that order. Knit fabric is produced and dyed in lots, so if your colour needs a fresh dye run nothing can be cut until it lands and passes shade approval — that is the single most common cause and it sits upstream of everything else. Second is sample sign-off: every day a brand spends deciding on a fit sample is a day production cannot begin, and that time rarely appears in anyone's plan. After those, trims arriving late, since elastic, zips and custom labels are bought in their own minimums from separate suppliers. Peak-season shipping congestion adds the rest. We build realistic dates into the quote rather than optimistic ones, and tell you early if something slips rather than at the point it becomes your problem.

For a realistic first order — around three hundred pieces across two styles in one colour — most brands land somewhere in the low thousands, before freight. The honest answer is that we cannot quote a number without knowing the garment, because fabric is forty to sixty per cent of the cost and a 180gsm tee and a 400gsm hoodie are different products. What we will not do is give you a per-piece price before we know what you are making; a quote that arrives before the questions is a quote for something else. Budget for sampling separately, expect to pay a deposit before production with the balance before shipment, and remember that reorders cost less because pattern, sample and screens are already paid for.

You can, and the more useful question is whether you should. The minimum is a hundred pieces per style per colour, so four styles in one colour is a four-hundred-piece order, which is achievable. But each style needs its own pattern, its own sample round and its own fabric allocation, so four styles cost meaningfully more per piece than one style at four hundred. For a first order we would usually push you toward two strong styles rather than five hesitant ones — you learn more from selling three hundred of something than from selling sixty of five things, and the reorder is cheaper because the setup is already paid. If you have a range you are committed to, we will make it. We would just rather tell you the trade-off first.