Fashion business information, advice, guidance, and education for fashion brands
Quality Control (QC) isn't just about ensuring your garments look good; it's your ticket to exceeding customer expectations, minimizing issues and setbacks, and optimizing production efficiency. By maintaining stringent QC standards, you deliver exceptional products and establish your brand as a reliable force in the industry.
When done right, it will make your life easier, decrease your stress level, increase your profit, and reduce waste.
Clothing manufacturing is not for the faint-hearted. Working with the wrong manufacturer can end your business, especially if you are a new brand.
You can take steps to find the right factory. However, some signs will only be noticed once you work with the factory.
So what are the symptoms that should make you run away from a factory?
What is the ideal number of styles that you should offer when launching your fashion brand?
On one hand, you don’t want to invest in a big line until you get your proof of concept, but on the other hand, you want your line to look big enough so it will be taken seriously.
Is there a magic number you should be aware of?
Developing a new apparel product is complex and requires numerous rounds of samples and fitting before you can get it right.
If you are new to this process, and since each round is an additional cost and time, the question becomes how many fittings rounds is reasonable to have? And how many rounds are too many?
Sourcing the right fabrics for your fashion products is half of the battle in developing the perfect garment.
However, the process can be overwhelming, long and frustrating, especially for a new brand that is new to the industry and can't yet commit to high volume.
How can you make this process more effective and less complicated?
Below I've put a checklist of the steps and actions that you should take to help you with that.
“We are experiencing many issues with our production, can you help us with this?”
If I had a cent for every time that I heard that sentence I would probably be retired by now.
Most fashion brands (especially if they are new or small), assume that since production is the last part in the process they’ll just worry about it when they get to it, and rather choose to focus mainly on designing and making the perfect samples.
NEWS FLASH - that is the wrong approach.
A good fit is obviously a result of a good pattern, but you will be surprised to learn how much impact your fitting sessions can have on how quick you will get there and how good and consistent your fit will be.
Not to mention how much money it will save you!
I have been part of hundreds of fitting sessions during my career and I'm always surprised to see how quick a fitting session can go wrong.
You have probably noticed it on some garments that you bought.
It is a number, usually somewhere on the care labels, most likely with the letters RN# before it. As in the picture below.
An RN number or registered identification number is a number issued by the FTC (Federal Trade Commission), upon request, to a business residing in the U.S. and engaged in the manufacture, importing, distribution, or sale of textile, wool, or fur products.
Deciding whether to produce your fashion product offshore or domestically goes beyond the reasons of cost and number of units you will need to produce.
As a matter of fact it's a decision that will impact how your business is set up and operates to best fit that scenario, re; what kind of people/services you should hire and even the details of your designs.
One of the most common mistakes we see with young designers is grading a pattern too early in the development process.
At what stage of the process should you grade your apparel pattern?
First, let’s explain what grading is:
Grading is the stage of sizing an apparel pattern up or down to create the patterns for the other sizes of that garment.
Your selling season just ended, your got orders (hopefully more than what was projected), Congratulations! So what now? What should you do next?
This next preparation stage can help iron out and clean any possible issues before you commit to production. This is where you will need to consolidate all your orders, confirm them, make production decisions and start the pre-production phase.
Here is a detailed step by step on what you should do now:
Collecting - Collect all your orders, go through all the details on each one of them to make sure all the info on them is clear and complete. Many times orders are being
