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How To Find A Clothing Manufacturer For Your Clothing Brand

In an industry where stakes are often high, your clothing manufacturers can be a life saviour. It is impossible to meet the growing demands of your customers if you do not have a reliable clothing manufacturer working with you. If you’re learning about how to start a clothing business, it is important to note that having a strong working relationship with your clothing manufacturer is one of the most important aspects of the business.

Young fashion labels often neglect the production aspect, which is a huge mistake. Do not focus on getting orders before ensuring that you have the production capabilities to fulfil those orders. Many labels scramble to find a reliable clothing manufacturer only when orders start to pile up. News can spread fast within the industry. If word gets out that you’ve failed to fulfil orders, it could shake the foundation of your business.

There are many different types of clothing manufacturers you can choose from, depending on what type of clothes they make, their quality levels and of course pricing.

Secure the right clothing manufacturer during the early stages of your label so that you know how to manage production moving forward. In this post, we help you to understand the type of manufacturing options in the market, what the production stage is, how to find and what to look for in clothing manufacturers.

How To Find A Clothing Manufacturer

What is production?

You have all the concepts ready for your new brand. You may even have a sample or prototype. Your only problem now is converting this small sample number into a bulk order. This is where your clothing manufacturer comes in. It is the production arm that will produce your samples on a large scale – in the hundreds or thousands depending on your requirements. Clothing manufacturers will have the materials and facilities required to produce a commercial-sized inventory.

Types of Clothing Manufacturers

There are manufacturers of different sizes, catering to different niches in the industry. On one end of the spectrum, you have the large factories that produce for the top brands like Nike & Polo Ralph, and on the other end smaller niche factories making specialised garments for luxury brands. In finding the right partner, it’s important to check if they are familiar and specialised in making the type of designs you want for your brand, and also if your order makes sense for them.

Large Scale Clothing Manufacturers

Big factories are usually highly specialised and have many operations vertically integrated into their manufacturing facilities. This also means their operations are highly efficient as they are set up to produce quickly thus lowering the costs for high volume orders. As a small brand, big factories won’t even bother to reply to your enquiries as your order quantities are simply not the right fit for their operation set up.

If they do take up your order, they will most likely charge you a higher cost to make up for their time in servicing your order and there is a risk that your orders may be passed over for bigger clients or higher priority orders during peak periods. You can’t really blame them for that as their biggest customers are paying the bills and keeping the lights on.

Smaller Factories

Small factories are usually the opposite of big factories. They have a limited range of manufacturing capabilities and won’t be able to accommodate all your design requests. This means they can’t compete with big factories on price, but they do offer flexibility to work with you on your designs.

Small scale factories also depend on you to provide precise information on what you want as they usually do not have the resource and manpower to help you to develop your ideas into samples. Some may not even have the resource to help you to source and recommend fabrics and prefer you to purchase the fabrics and send them.

The main reason for this is not that they don’t want to be helpful, but it takes up a lot of time to develop designs. The same amount of cost and effort is required to develop designs & samples for an order of 100 or 10,000 pieces.

Why is it difficult to find suppliers?

As the fashion industry grows, the markets become more saturated and competition stiff. Thus, many brands keep clothing manufacturer information close to themselves to avoid wavering their position in the market. This makes finding your own clothing manufacturer more difficult, but not impossible. It only means that you will have to invest a bit more time and legwork to research and find a reliable clothing manufacturer. And once you find one, you’ll probably not give away the information so easily either.

How to find clothing manufacturers?

If you haven’t had much luck hunting for suitable clothing manufacturers, here are some tips that you can try:

Go Back To Your Past

They say if you have to leave your job, you should always leave on good terms and you are about to learn why. If you’ve worked in fashion companies before, you may have gained plenty of experience in the field to start your own label, but lack the right contacts. In this situation, your previous employers can be a source of help. Get in touch with them. They might be able to refer any of their existing clothing manufacturer contacts to you (if you had left on a good note, that is).

Fashion School

If you were lucky enough to have studied fashion at a professional institution, you also have your professors to turn to for help. Established fashion schools are often in contact with clothing manufacturers for many reasons. Your professors might be kind enough to give you the push you need in this competitive industry if you just ask.

Online Resources

The luxury of living in a digital age is that it is possible to find the answers to our questions in just one click. A simple online search can point you in the right direction and uncover a whole list of clothing manufacturers for you. The challenge, however, is to know how to choose the right one. But this is still a good start. Study the websites of clothing manufacturers carefully – look at their MOQs, price quotation lists, ratings, testimonials and any other information that helps you to determine their reliability and how suitable their services are for you.

What to look for in a clothing manufacturer as a potential partner?

As you have learned, it is not easy to find the right clothing manufacturer. A good clothing manufacturer has to be reliable and ideally one you can have a long-term working partnership with. A long-term partnership lowers the risk of experiencing errors in production. Equally important are the price, quantity and quality of production.

Communication is very vital in getting the products done right. It’s better to work with a clothing manufacturer that is familiar with making the products you want as they can give you advice on how to improve your products. Working with the right manufacturer will help you to avoid preventable errors due to their production limitations.

clothing manufacturers offer discounts on bulk orders as they can pass on economies of scale savings to you. Thus, it is important to find one with market-competitive rates and an MOQ that best suits your business. And ultimately, what will represent your brand is your product. Quality control is extremely important – the clothing manufacturer’s workmanship has to be of satisfactory standards.

It’s challenging to find the right clothing manufacturer, but take comfort in the fact that once you’ve done so, you would have overcome one of the biggest hurdles of starting a clothing line. So do put in the effort to build and maintain a strong relationship that is mutually beneficial to both parties. Keep them happy and they will return the favour and be equally invested to make sure you do well.

You are well on your way to learning the basics of how to start a clothing business. In our upcoming post, we dive deeper into the challenges that come with owning and growing a clothing brand.

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