Resources for clothing brands

Collective Studio's free resources page gathers seven calculators, a free tech pack template and three reference guides, made by a knitwear factory in Narayanganj, Bangladesh. The MOQ calculator turns styles, colours and pieces per colourway into a total run and a size split. The pricing calculator builds your unit cost and shows margin, markup and wholesale and retail prices. The landed cost calculator adds duty, import VAT or GST and customs fees for 32 countries, with the official sources listed. The launch date calculator works out the date an order must be confirmed. The AQL calculator gives inspection sample sizes and accept and reject numbers for critical, major and minor defects. The GSM converter switches fabric weight between GSM and ounces, and the fabric consumption calculator turns measurements and GSM into kilos of fabric per garment and per order. The guides are a tech pack checklist, a fabric and GSM guide and a manufacturing glossary.

Yes, every tool on this page is free, and none of them asks for an email address or a sign-up. The seven calculators do their sums in your browser, so the numbers you type are not sent to us or stored against your name. Your inputs leave the page only if you press 'Send this as my brief', which opens our contact form with those figures filled in, and they reach us as an enquiry only if you then submit that form. The tech pack template is a direct PDF download with no form in front of it. Site analytics load only if you accept cookies, so you can decline and still use everything. We publish the tools because a founder who understands MOQ maths and AQL sampling before approaching any factory has a better first conversation, and that is worth more to us than a list of email addresses.

If you have never manufactured before, start with the Start Here path rather than a calculator, because it puts the decisions in order; otherwise start with the MOQ calculator. That shows what your first run really adds up to across styles and colourways. Take that quantity and a quoted unit cost into the landed cost calculator to add duty and import tax, then into the pricing calculator to see whether your retail price leaves a margin worth having. If the sums work, the launch date calculator estimates when the order would need to be confirmed to hit your on-sale date. Use the GSM converter and the fabric guide while you choose fabric, and the tech pack template to record what you have decided as you move towards a first sample. The AQL calculator comes last: you need it when you agree inspection terms in your purchase order, so the sample size and the accept and reject numbers are fixed before production starts.

The MOQ calculator shows what a minimum order commits you to once your whole range is counted, because the minimum applies to every style and colour. You enter three things: styles, colours per style and pieces per colourway. It returns the total production run, the number of separate SKUs (each style in each colour) and the pieces in each, and flags whether each colourway reaches our minimum of 150 pieces per style and per colour. Two styles in three colours each, for example, make six SKUs and 900 pieces at that minimum. It then splits each colourway across sizes from XS to XXL using a typical adult unisex curve that puts 30% of the pieces in M and another 30% in L, a starting point to adjust to your own customers. The pieces-per-colourway field accepts any whole number, so the same arithmetic checks another supplier's minimum as easily as ours.

AQL stands for acceptance quality limit, the worst average defect rate you agree to tolerate, and AQL sampling is the statistical method the apparel industry uses to inspect a bulk order without checking every single garment. Enter your order quantity and the calculator returns the inspection sample size plus the maximum number of defects allowed before the batch fails, based on the standard tables published as ISO 2859-1 and ANSI/ASQ Z1.4. You need it when you are agreeing inspection terms for a production run — the widely used apparel standard is AQL 2.5 for major defects and 4.0 for minor, with zero tolerance for critical safety defects. Specify those numbers in your purchase order before production starts, because agreeing them upfront turns a later quality dispute from an argument about opinions into a numerical check.

You need one before production, though not to ask for a quote: a sketch or a reference garment is enough to start that conversation. The tech pack is the document a factory actually makes your garment from, so every gap in it becomes a decision someone else takes for you. Our template is enough for a first style, because it sets out the nine standard sections a factory works from. It comes as a printable three-page A4 PDF and as an Excel file: print the PDF and write by hand, or type straight into the Excel cells. Fill in what you have already decided, above all the drawing, the measurements that matter most, what the fabric is made of and how heavy it is, and how each colour should look, and leave the rest to work through with the factory during sampling. The tech pack checklist explains why each field exists and what goes wrong when it is left blank.

Yes, and they are designed for exactly that. MOQ arithmetic, AQL sampling tables, GSM conversion and margin maths work the same whichever factory you use. The launch date calculator is the exception: it counts back through our own published production timeline, so its confirm-by date applies to an order with us. Our own figures appear only in a few labelled places, such as the 150-piece minimum per style and colour in the MOQ calculator. The landed cost calculator covers a Bangladesh-made cotton knit tee, sweatshirt or hoodie, so it works for any Bangladesh supplier of those, but not for a factory in another country. Used together, the tools let you test a quote line by line: whether a minimum means what the supplier says once colours are counted, whether their inspection plan matches the standard sample size for your order, and whether their unit price still leaves you a margin once duty and import tax are added.