The Garment Manufacturing Process, Step by Step: From Tech Pack to Packed Carton

A garment goes through roughly nine stages between a drawing and a packed carton, and a brand only controls four of them. Knowing which four is the difference between a range that arrives as expected and one that arrives as a surprise. This guide walks the whole process in the order it happens on our floor in Narayanganj, says who does what, and marks the points where your approval stops the line until you give it.

The nine stages, and where your approval is needed

The four moments that are genuinely yours are the tech pack, the lab dip, the pre-production sample and the inspection report. Everything else is ours to run. If a supplier asks you to approve nothing before bulk, that is not flexibility, it is risk being transferred to you quietly.

1. The brief and the tech pack

Production starts when a drawing becomes measurements. A tech pack turns your idea into the numbers a pattern cutter works from: finished measurements at every point of measure, fabric and weight, trims, stitch types, label placement and tolerances. You do not need one to begin. A sketch, a garment you like and a paragraph about your customer are enough for us to build the pack with you, and our guide to making one shows what a complete pack contains.

What this stage decides is everything downstream. A vague brief does not produce a vague garment; it produces a specific garment chosen by somebody else. The free tech pack template and checklist are there so that does not happen.

2. Pattern making and grading

The pattern room turns the spec into paper or digital pieces: front, back, sleeves, neck rib, pockets, facings. Then those pieces are graded, scaled up and down across your size range, which is not simple multiplication. A chest grows differently from an armhole, and a good grade is why an XL fits an XL customer rather than looking like a stretched medium. Our size chart guide covers the measurements to give us.

Pattern and grading are one-off costs. They are the same money whether you order 100 pieces or 10,000, which is the single biggest reason unit price falls as quantity rises.

3. Fabric: knitting, dyeing and finishing

This is the stage most brands underestimate, and it is usually the longest. Yarn is knitted into greige cloth, dyed to your colour, then finished: compacted to control shrinkage, brushed if it is fleece, set to width. We do this at partner mills inside the same industrial cluster rather than pretending to own a dye house, and we specify, book and inspect the work in person.

Your job here is the lab dip: a small swatch dyed to your colour reference, which you approve or reject before hundreds of kilos are committed. Approve it under the right light and against a physical reference, not on a screen. Our guide to dye lots and colour matching explains why that matters more than it sounds.

4. and 5. Sampling: fit first, then pre-production

Two samples do two different jobs. The fit sample settles the block, often in whatever suitable fabric is on hand, because you are judging proportion and measurement rather than colour. You comment, we correct, and sometimes that loop runs twice.

The pre-production sample is the one that matters. It is made in your actual fabric, your actual colour and your actual trims, on the line that will make the bulk, and it is wash-tested so the measurements you approve are measurements after washing. When you sign it off we seal it, and every piece in the run is measured against that sealed garment. How clothing sampling works covers the costs and the timings.

6. Cutting: the marker decides your fabric bill

Cutting begins with a marker, a map of every pattern piece nested together as tightly as possible across the fabric width. Marker efficiency, usually between the high seventies and the high eighties as a percentage, decides how much cloth your order consumes and therefore a large part of what it costs. Fabric is then laid up in plies, sometimes a hundred deep, cut with a straight knife or automatic cutter, and bundled by size and shade.

Bundling by shade matters. Even within one dye lot there can be slight variation between rolls, so pieces are kept together so that a single garment is never assembled from two different rolls. Our guide to fabric consumption shows how the arithmetic works.

7. Sewing: where the lead time goes

A sewing line is a sequence of operations, each with a measured time: join shoulders, attach neck rib, set sleeves, close side seams, hem, attach labels. A simple tee might be a dozen operations; a zip-through hoodie with pockets and drawcords can be forty. The line is balanced so no station becomes a bottleneck, and output is measured per hour against a target.

This is why construction changes price more than most founders expect. Adding a pocket is not a materials decision, it is minutes per garment multiplied by the whole run. It is also why the first run of a new style is slower than the third: the line learns it.

8. Finishing and decoration

Printing, embroidery and washing happen either before assembly, as with a chest print applied to a cut panel, or after, as with garment dye. We run screen printing, DTF and DTG, embroidery and sublimation in our own building, which removes a handover that otherwise adds a week and a second quality risk.

You approve a strike-off or an embroidery sew-out before bulk decoration, for the same reason you approve a lab dip. Screen printing vs embroidery vs DTG explains which method suits which artwork.

9. Quality control, packing and shipping

Inspection happens during the line, not only at the end, and then as a final random inspection against an AQL standard. Walter Meyer's team measures finished pieces against the sealed sample, checks seams, prints, labels and shade, and produces a report. Garments are then folded, poly-bagged, cartoned, and the cartons marked to your packing list.

We ship DDP, so freight, clearance and duty sit inside one landed price, and the commercial invoice, packing list and statement on origin reach you before the goods move. The freight and Incoterms guide covers what each term includes.

Where the calendar actually goes

Founders usually assume sewing is the long pole. It rarely is. On a typical 40 to 50 day production window, fabric is the largest single block, sewing is the second, and the stages a brand can shorten are the ones before the clock starts: how fast the tech pack is finalised, how quickly the lab dip is approved, and how long the pre-production sample sits in an inbox. The launch date calculator counts backwards from your on-sale date and tells you plainly if the plan is short.