How to find and work with a clothing manufacturer.

The three arrangements differ in how much of the garment you design and who buys the cloth.

1. Ready-made stock with your labels. The supplier sews your labels into garments it already makes and packs them to your instructions.
2. Full package, also called FPP. The factory develops the pattern and buys the fabric and trims, then sews to your spec.
3. Cut, make and trim (CMT). You buy the fabric and have it delivered to the factory, then pay the factory for cutting and sewing. The mill and its minimums are yours to deal with.

FashionMe calls the first kind Stock Match: 10 units minimum, shipped in 7 to 10 days, or 50 per style with your own labels sewn in. Made to Order is the full-package route, from 50 pieces.

A CMT price looks lower than a full-package one until you add the fabric, the trims and the cash tied up in them.

Maker's Row lists US factories by product. One within driving distance can be visited whenever a sample needs checking. Its price has no ocean freight or import duty in it. An overseas quote compares with it only after being turned into a landed cost.

Sea freight arriving in the United States is listed on a vessel manifest, and CBP releases manifest data under 19 CFR 103.31. Panjiva, ImportGenius and ImportYeti index it. A search on a brand that sells the kind of garment you want to make returns the shipper's name and address, with how much it sends and how often.

The shipper on a bill of lading isn't always the factory; often it is a trading company, a freight forwarder or the brand's own buying office in Asia. A search in the company register tells you whether the name belongs to a factory or a trader.

A garment's care label names the business responsible for it or gives a registration number (RN), issued by the FTC only to US businesses. Older pieces sometimes show a WPL number. The FTC stopped issuing those, but existing ones still identify a company. Looking up either number gives the name of the US brand or importer to run through the manifest search.

Alibaba gives a Verified Supplier badge to companies a third-party inspection firm has checked. The equivalent marks are Audited Supplier on Made-in-China and Verified Manufacturer on Global Sources. A search for "women's linen shirt" turns up more of the right suppliers than "clothing" does. The product catalog is a better guide than the company profile to what a supplier actually makes.

The useful test at a trade show booth is to hand over a finished sample and a swatch and ask how they'd sew it; the contacts worth keeping answer without fetching a colleague. The Canton Fair's autumn 2026 session has more than 32,000 exhibitors, with clothing in the third phase, October 31 to November 4.

A sourcing service or agent does the searching and checking for a fee. FashionMe charges a sourcing fee of 12 percent of the supplier invoice on orders under $5,000, stepping down to 5 percent above $50,000; on Stock Match it is built into the price. Other agents bill a flat fee or take their cut as a markup on the factory price or a commission from the factory.

Three quick checks shorten the list: location, the company register and fit with your product.

Garment making in China clusters along the coast, often in towns devoted to one product. Plenty of good factories have moved inland. With one of those, the thing to ask is where the fabric and trims come from and how long they take to arrive.

Every registered Chinese company has an 18-character Unified Social Credit Code. Entered into GSXT, the government's free register, it brings up the company's name, registered capital and licensed business scope, with a note of whether the company is still active. The site is in Chinese only, behind a captcha that can be slow to load from abroad. Manufacturing should appear among the licensed activities. A scope that lists only sales belongs to a trader.

To test fit with your product, ask for photos of a similar garment the factory has made in bulk. A catalog full of jersey basics says little about how the same workshop would handle a structured jacket.

Any order where cloth is bought for your run, full package or CMT, has a floor set by the fabric. Your first email should quote at least that quantity.

The calculation starts with how much fabric one garment uses. A pattern maker or the factory's cutting room gives the exact figure. Until you have it, a published range will do: a shirt takes about 1.3 to 1.6 meters of 54-inch cloth (1.4 to 1.75 yards), and less on wider cloth.

Mill minimums apply color by color, and many mills won't sell less than one full roll per color, about 100 meters. A custom shade needs a separate dye lot. At one North American fabric supplier a custom dye lot is about 400 pounds of fabric: 300 to 400 yards of a heavy cloth, or 800 to 1,000 yards of a light one. The gap between a mill's stock-color and custom-color minimums, divided by the fabric in one garment, is the number of extra units a custom shade commits you to. In a light shirting at 1.5 meters a shirt, that dye lot comes to roughly 490 to 610 shirts in one color, against 66 from a stock-color roll.

An order of 40 in that color leaves the rest of the roll paid for and sitting at the factory. Smaller runs are possible when the factory buys further down the chain. Converters buy unfinished greige fabric from mills, then dye, print or finish it, and offer more colors without the mill's large minimum. Jobbers sell surplus from converters and mills in small quantities. A jobber fabric that sells out is usually gone for good. Reordering the style then means finding a new fabric.

The cutting room's marker, the layout of pattern pieces across the width of the cloth, decides how much of the fabric ends up in garments. CAD markers on woven garments typically use 85 to 92 percent of it. Say a better marker takes your shirt from 1.5 meters to 1.38. Fabric cost per shirt falls by 8 percent, and a 300-piece order needs 36 fewer meters. At the floor you still buy the whole roll. It now yields 72 shirts. An order of 66 leaves about 9 meters paid for and unused, and the saving reaches your unit cost only once the order rises to 72.

Trims have separate minimums: a woven label, a branded zipper pull or a custom snap needs a setup that the supplier spreads over a minimum run. Your order has to clear whichever minimum is highest, the fabric's, a trim's or the factory's.

A factory that quotes a custom-color run well under your fabric floor may have the shade in stock. If not, either it hasn't checked the fabric yet or it plans to buy the full dye lot and keep the leftover cloth for other orders. In that last case you pay for holding the cloth through your unit price.

Keep the first order to the smallest quantity your floor allows. It is where you learn how the factory works. A big run of an untested design can leave the slow sizes and colors in a warehouse for months.

A factory may set two minimums, one per order and one per style. With 300 per order and 75 per style, four single-color styles of 75 meet both and clear a 66-unit fabric floor.

A ready-made test order tells you whether a style sells before anything is spent on development. The budget for a custom first order needs room for one extra sample round, in case the pre-production sample needs changes.

A request for quotation (RFQ) needs a subject line a busy sales desk can sort at a glance, for example "RFQ: women's linen shirt, 300 pcs, 2 colors, FOB Ningbo." In the body, cover:

1. Who you are, where you sell and the date the goods need to arrive.
2. The garment in a sentence or two, with photos or a sketch. Detailed drawings can wait.
3. Your quantity per style and per color, starting from your floor, with the yearly volume you expect if the first run sells.
4. Your target price per unit, on a named delivery term and port.

Then the questions:

1. The minimum order quantity (MOQ) per style, per color and per size.
2. Whether they're a factory or an agent, and if an agent, which factory would sew the order.
3. The registered Chinese company name and its Unified Social Credit Code.
4. The sample fee and sample lead time, and whether the fee comes off the bulk invoice.
5. The bulk lead time, and what starts the clock: the deposit, fabric arrival or sample approval.
6. Two brands making a similar garment with them that you can contact.

A reply that skips a question needs a follow-up before the supplier goes on the shortlist. Note how long the answers take. The person who replies is usually the one who will handle your sample comments later.

A reply might read: "MOQ 100pcs no problem, price depends on fabric, add my WhatsApp for faster communication, we need 100% payment before production."

It gives the minimum as one number and ignores the per-color question. Moving to a chat app is fine if prices, decisions and approvals still go into email or an order system you can search later. Full payment up front on a custom run is the term to push back on: until the goods ship, the whole risk is yours.

A minimum that rises after you've agreed to it is a renegotiation. At this stage walking away costs nothing. Many factories quote from a sales office in a big city, away from the plant. If the quote comes in another company's name, that company may be the factory's own trading arm or an intermediary; a register search on both names settles which.

A live video call gives a first look at a factory you can't visit: the cutting table and a sewing line with another customer's order on it say more than the showroom does. The two reference brands from your first email can tell you whether their bulk matched the approved sample.

Certificates and test reports can be checked with the body that issued them, using the report number. Some schemes run public lookups: OEKO-TEX Label Check for STANDARD 100 labels and WRAP's list of certified facilities. A certificate the issuer can't find is a reason to drop the supplier.

"We are certified" doesn't say which scheme, or when. Audit reports and certificates expire on different schedules:

A report older than those periods has lapsed under the scheme's rules. The first four in the table look at working conditions. ISO 9001 is about the quality management system. GOTS and GRS certify organic and recycled content, and OEKO-TEX STANDARD 100 tests the fabric for harmful substances.

Inspection firms charge from $500 for a one-day audit with travel and a written report. QIMA's price is $649. TÜV and SGS start at $800. For an order of 300 tees at $7.50, worth $2,250, that adds 22 to 36 percent. Where a sourcing service assigns the factory, the audit questions go to the service: what it audits, how often and against which standard.

A factory that has your design can make it for itself or sell around you to your customers. A US-style NDA covers disclosure only. The NNN agreement used in China adds clauses against using the design and going around you, and it should be signed while the factory has seen nothing more than photos and a sketch. To hold up, the agreement needs to name the factory by its registered Chinese name and bear the company's official seal, called a chop. The Chinese text should normally control, with disputes going to a court in China, which can reach the factory's assets.

China registers trademarks on a first-to-file basis. The US Commerce Department advises brands to file there early, ahead of anyone who might register the name in bad faith.

The tech pack is the document the factory prices from and the inspector checks against. A complete one includes:

1. Flat sketches of the front and back, with callouts.
2. A measurement chart for every size, with a tolerance on every point of measure.
3. A bill of materials: fabrics by composition, weight and width; trims by supplier and part number.
4. Construction notes giving the seam and stitch types, with stitch length in stitches per inch.
5. The positions of the brand label and the care label.
6. Packing instructions, down to the fold, the polybag and the carton marks.

A note that says only "topstitch here" leaves the line to decide. You might get one row of stitching or two. Spell out single-needle or twin-needle, 10 stitches per inch, 1/4 inch from the edge. On twin-needle work the gap between the rows, in millimeters, is a separate measurement from the stitch length.

Compared point by point with the pack, the first sample exposes every place the factory had to guess, and those gaps become the edits for the next version.

Quotes compare only when the finalists itemize them the same way, with fabric and trims priced apart from the sewing charge and the extras, from decoration and packaging to sampling, testing and freight, on separate lines. A split price lets you drop a color later, or change the size mix, and reprice only what changed.

The delivery term changes what a price includes. EXW means you collect from the factory door: the goods aren't loaded or cleared for export, and everything from there on is yours to arrange. FOB adds export clearance, the truck to the port and loading onto the vessel. Once the goods are on board, you pay for the ocean freight, insurance, import clearance and duty. Under DDP the seller delivers to your door with the duty paid. FashionMe ships on DDP or FOB.

A DDP quote raises one question: who is the importer of record, the party customs holds responsible for the entry, the duty owed and any detention?

Every quote then needs turning into a landed cost per unit. US duty is charged on the value of the goods, with freight and insurance left out of the customs value. For 400 cotton knit T-shirts from China quoted FOB, at the October 2026 duty rate and with an example freight bill:

Duty in this example costs more than twice the freight. The broker's fee and the bond are extra, as is the interest on a deposit paid weeks before the goods arrive.

Name the governing law and the forum for disputes in the purchase order. With no arbitration clause, a dispute with a Chinese supplier ends up in a local Chinese court, in Chinese. Enforcing a foreign court's judgment there depends on a treaty or reciprocity between China and the other country. Two bodies hear foreign commercial disputes: CIETAC in Beijing and the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre (HKIAC). HKIAC awards are enforced in mainland China under a 1999 arrangement between the mainland and Hong Kong.

The order should name the factory that will sew it, with the company you sign with answering for quality and no subcontracting without your written consent.

A factory that digitizes your pattern keeps the graded file on its computers, and without a clause it can cut your garment for someone else. The clause you want says the patterns, markers and tech pack belong to you and can't be used for another buyer.

Put the lead time in the order as a number of days from a named event, such as approval of the PP sample. The same clause should say what happens if it slips: a discount per day late, or the factory paying the difference between sea and air freight.

Ready-made stock is normally paid in full at order. FashionMe works that way on Stock Match and takes a deposit on Made to Order, with the balance due before shipment.

A small buyer ordering custom production usually pays a 30 percent deposit and the other 70 percent before shipment; many long-standing customers still pay the full amount ahead of loading. Several private-label makers publish a 50 percent deposit.

Tie the deposit to a signed order and an approved fit sample. The balance should follow a passed final inspection. Paying it after shipment, against a copy of the bill of lading, is something to negotiate when you have a track record.

Some buyers ask to hold part of the money back: 30 percent deposit, 50 percent before shipment and 20 percent within 10 days of receiving the goods. The last 20 percent covers bad pieces slipped into the cartons after the final inspection. Factories seldom accept it.

Most factory payments go by bank wire (T/T). Wires are cheap enough to split an order into several payments. A letter of credit protects the buyer better but costs more in bank fees. It suits orders of $30,000 to $50,000 and up with a supplier you haven't tested. At least half of suppliers refuse it. Trade Assurance, Alibaba's order protection, covers orders paid through the platform and gives access to its dispute process.

Payments should go only to an account held in the registered company's name; a different name on it is a reason to stop and ask. New bank details sent by email are worth a phone call to the factory, on a number you already had.

A rework clause belongs next to the payment terms. A batch that fails the agreed inspection is reworked or replaced at the factory's cost within a stated number of days, without moving the ship date.

An inspection at the end of production can only report on finished goods. By then any problem in the cloth has been cut and sewn into 300 garments. A check while the fabric is still on the roll can stop the run: if the shade is off, the rolls go back to the mill before a panel is cut.

Common practice is to inspect at least 10 percent of the rolls, measuring shade, width and weight against the approved standard. Visible defects are scored by length on the 4-point system:

Up to 3 inches

1 point

Over 3, up to 6 inches

2 points

Over 6, up to 9 inches

3 points

Over 9 inches

4 points

No linear yard is charged more than four points. A common pass mark is 40 points per 100 square yards. Your order can set a stricter one.

What the factory sends is all you see of the work between deposit and shipment. Agree in advance on what it sends and when:

1. Photos of the bulk rolls when they arrive, held next to the approved fabric swatch.
2. A photo of the cutting table, where shade, fabric and the layout of the pieces all show days before sewing starts.
3. Photos of the first finished pieces off the line, laid next to the PP sample.
4. The final inspection report.
5. Photos of the cartons or container being loaded.

Agree on one named contact at the factory and one on your side. A one-line email after every call, confirming what was agreed, leaves a written record if a dispute comes up later.

Ocean freight is normally booked 3 to 4 weeks ahead of departure, or 4 to 5 in the rush before Lunar New Year. Samples and small top-ups go by courier or air.

A sea shipment to the US needs an Importer Security Filing (ISF), lodged by the importer or its broker with the factory's and forwarder's details no later than 24 hours before the cargo is loaded onto the US-bound ship. A late or missing filing can cost $5,000 per violation. The factory's part is the commercial invoice and packing list for your broker, then the bill of lading or air waybill.

Shipments worth up to $2,500 can clear on a simpler informal entry, but the ceiling drops to $250 for goods under a Section 301 tariff. That puts almost any China-made order through a formal entry, filed by a licensed customs broker and backed by a customs bond: a single-entry bond for one shipment or a continuous bond covering a year of imports.

A formal entry comes with two fees: the merchandise processing fee, 0.3464 percent of the goods' value with a minimum of $34.58 and a maximum of $670.86 per entry in the fiscal year that began October 1, 2026, and for ocean cargo the harbor maintenance fee, 0.125 percent.

Duty depends on the garment's code in the Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS). The code turns on fiber and on whether the fabric is knit or woven. Men's and women's cuts often have different codes. Normal rates on clothing go as high as 32 percent: a cotton knit T-shirt (6109.10.00) pays 16.5 percent, a synthetic one (6109.90.10) 32.

Most China-made clothing pays a further Section 301 tariff, imposed by the US Trade Representative in 2019 and set at 7.5 percent since February 2020. The 2025 emergency-powers (IEEPA) tariffs are gone. The Supreme Court struck them down on February 20, 2026. Since July 24, 2026, a new Section 301 tariff adds 12.5 percent for goods from China and Vietnam and 10 percent for Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia and Malaysia.

A synthetic tee, at 32 percent normal duty, comes to 52. Textiles and apparel from Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia and Malaysia are due to get tariff-rate quotas, and goods inside a quota won't pay the new tariff. The quotas are to run for an initial three years, with volumes based on the countries' imports of US inputs. Until the volumes are set, the full rate applies.

The $800 duty-free allowance for small parcels ended for goods from China on May 2, 2025, and for every other country on August 29, 2025. The Court of International Trade upheld the suspension on August 13, 2026; Congress had already repealed the allowance in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, effective July 1, 2027. A box of samples no longer gets through on value alone and owes duty unless another exemption or a zero rate applies.

Rates have moved several times since 2025. A separate Section 301 investigation into China is still open. A customs broker can confirm your code and the current rate when you price an order.

CBP lists apparel, cotton and cotton products among its top priorities in enforcing the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. Cotton supply is the reason: Xinjiang grew 6.165 million of China's 6.641 million metric tons in 2025, about 93 percent. Its fiber is spun and traded through mills across Asia, and CBP's 2023 apparel detentions included goods made in Vietnam and Cambodia.

The law presumes that anything made wholly or partly in Xinjiang was made with forced labor, and it bars those goods from entry. To get a detained shipment released, you have to show by clear and convincing evidence that the presumption is wrong. That's a higher bar than the "preponderance of the evidence" standard in most US civil cases; in practice it takes paperwork tracing the garment through every supplier back to the raw fiber. Goods with no Xinjiang link at all go through an applicability review, where you show the law doesn't apply to the shipment.

The UFLPA Entity List names companies whose goods are barred wherever they are made, even with no Xinjiang material in them. The August 3, 2026 update was the first since January 2025 and the largest so far, adding 43 companies. Apparel and cotton firms are among the 187 entities now listed.

Before the purchase order is signed, a US-bound cotton order needs two answers from the supplier: who spun the yarn, and where the cotton was grown. The answers go into the order as a warranty. Every company in the chain, from the spinner to the fabric mill, is checked against the current list. If a cotton style can't be traced back to the fiber, the detention risk sits with the importer of record, which on FOB or EXW terms is you.