How to find a clothing manufacturer

There is no shortage of advice about finding a manufacturer, and most of it is written by people who have never run a production line. This is the version from the other side of the table.

First, decide what you are actually looking for

“Clothing manufacturer” covers at least four different businesses, and picking the wrong category wastes months.

• Full-package (FOB) manufacturer. Buys the fabric and trims, makes the garment, ships it. You pay one price per piece. This is what most brands want and what we do.
• CMT unit. Cut, make and trim only. You supply the fabric and trims. Cheaper per piece, but you now own fabric sourcing, quality and timing — a real job.
• Private label supplier. Sells you an existing garment with your label in it. Fast and cheap; you have no control over the product.
• Sourcing agent or trading house. Finds a factory for you and takes a commission. Useful if you have no capacity to manage suppliers; expensive if you do, and the factory is often invisible to you.

A related decision: knitwear or woven? Almost no factory is genuinely good at both. Jersey, terry, fleece and rib are knitted, and knitting mills cluster in places like Tiruppur. Shirts, trousers and tailoring are woven, and cluster elsewhere. A factory claiming to be excellent at both is usually sub-contracting one of them.

Where to look

Trade fairs are still the best single source. You can touch the cloth, meet the people, and see in ten minutes whether they understand your product. For knitwear, India Knit Fair in Tiruppur, Bharat Tex, and the sourcing halls at Première Vision and Texworld are all worth the flight.

Industry associations publish member lists that have been through at least some vetting: the Apparel Export Promotion Council in India, the Tiruppur Exporters’ Association, and the equivalent bodies in Portugal, Turkey and Vietnam.

B2B marketplaces — Alibaba, IndiaMART, Kompass, Europages — are a reasonable way to build a longlist and a poor way to make a decision. Assume anyone can write anything on a profile.

Look at garments you admire. The care label tells you the country. A polite email to the brand occasionally gets you a name, and more often you can find the factory through a compliance database or a certification body’s public directory.

Ask certification bodies. GOTS, OEKO-TEX and Sedex publish searchable databases of certified facilities. This is an underused route, and it has the useful property that everyone on it has already passed an audit.

The questions that actually separate factories

Anyone can answer “what is your capacity?”. These are the questions where a good factory sounds different from a bad one.

“Which stages do you own, and which do you buy?” The single most useful question in sourcing. A unit that buys greige fabric, sends it to a dyehouse and cuts what comes back has three suppliers between your order and your delivery date, and no control over the most failure-prone stage. Ask specifically about dyeing.

“Can I see the dyehouse?” If the answer is evasive, they do not own it. That is not disqualifying, but you should know.

“What is your right-first-time percentage on dyeing?” A factory that measures it will tell you. A factory that does not measure it will change the subject. Re-dyeing is where lead times quietly disappear.

“What went wrong on your last shipment, and what did you do?” Everyone has a bad shipment. What you are testing is whether they will tell you about it. A supplier who claims nothing ever goes wrong is either inexperienced or not being straight with you.

“What are you not good at?” The best answer we ever heard from a supplier was a clear list. A factory that says yes to everything will say yes to your order too, and then find out.

“Who will I actually be emailing?” Sourcing lives or dies on the merchandiser. Meet them, not just the director.

Red flags

• A quote with no questions. If a factory prices your garment without asking about fabric weight, colour count or size ratio, they are guessing, and you will pay for the guess later.
• A published MOQ that never changes. Minimums in knitwear are set by dye lots, which vary by fabric and shade. A single number across all products means nobody has done the arithmetic.
• Prices well below everyone else. There are only three places that money can come from: the fabric specification, the wages, or the fact that they do not intend to hit your quality standard.
• No interest in your compliance requirements. A factory that shrugs at your restricted-substance list has not read it.
• Reluctance to give references. Ask for two current customers in your market, and actually call them.
• Photographs that appear on three other websites. Reverse image search takes thirty seconds.

How to run the first sample properly

The sample stage is where you learn what a factory is really like, so use it deliberately.

1. Send a complete brief. Every gap is filled by an assumption. Our tech pack checklist covers what a factory needs.
2. Ask for a fabric swatch before the garment. Fabric decides most of what you will like or dislike about the finished piece, and a swatch takes days instead of weeks.
3. Give a target price up front. This is not weakness. It stops both sides spending a sampling round on a product that was never going to work commercially.
4. Judge the reply, not just the sample. How long did it take? Did they flag problems, or silently make something else? Did they ask sensible questions? You are hiring a communication channel as much as a factory.
5. Then run a pre-production sample. Approved shade, approved trims, approved measurements, made on the real line. Nothing should go into bulk without it.

Get your own numbers first

The most common reason a sourcing conversation goes badly is that the brand does not know its own arithmetic, so it cannot tell a good quote from a bad one. Before you email anyone:

• Work out your fabric consumption per piece with the consumption calculator.
• Build a rough cost with the garment costing calculator so you know what proportion is fabric.
• Model your colour count against dye lots with the MOQ planner.

Arrive with those and the conversation changes completely. You will be able to ask why a quote is high, and understand the answer.

A note on where we fit

We are a knitwear manufacturer in Tiruppur that owns knitting, dyeing, finishing and garmenting. That makes us a good fit for terry, velour, fleece, jacquard and jersey products, and for buyers who want one point of ownership rather than the lowest possible unit price. It makes us a poor fit for woven tailoring, and for commodity volumes of plain white tees, and we would rather say so now than after your sampling round.

If that sounds like your product, tell us what you want made.