How to find and work with a clothing manufacturer.

A schedule from first enquiry to boxes on your floor has four stages that each take weeks: research and outreach, collecting and comparing quotes, sampling with its revision rounds, then production. Sea freight from Asia adds three to five weeks at the end. Brands with a launch date usually start looking six to nine months out.

01the search

Where to find factories.

Thirty names down to three. Two to four weeks, most of it reading.

Begin with garments that already exist, because somebody has done this sourcing job before you and left a record of it. Sea freight arriving in the United States generates a vessel manifest, and those are public under 19 CFR 103.31. Panjiva, ImportGenius and ImportYeti index them. Type in a brand that sells the garment you want to make and you may get their supplier's name, the factory address, the volume and the frequency. A factory already shipping parkas to a brand you rate has done the job for a buyer with money on it.

When you have the garment but not the brand's corporate name, the care label gets you into that search. US garments must identify whoever is responsible for the product, using either a full legal name or an FTC-issued RN. The RN is optional. Plenty of labels carry a name instead. WPL numbers turn up on older garments. The FTC stopped issuing them long ago. Either way the name you get is the US importer, never the factory. That name goes into the manifest search. The search returns the supplier.

Platforms fill the gaps the customs data misses. Alibaba, Made-in-China and Global Sources between them list most of the export trade. Filter on Verified Supplier, Assessed Supplier and Trade Assurance, and search on the product: a listing saying "outerwear, technical" will quote your parka, one saying "apparel manufacturing" is a trading company.

Around thirty names is the useful size for a starting list. Fewer than ten gives you nothing to compare against. Much beyond thirty is a fortnight of reading you will not get back.

Now cut that list before you write to anybody, using three checks that take about a minute each.

Geography is the fastest. Chinese garment production clusters in Guangdong, Fujian, Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Shandong, with denim and knitwear concentrated in particular towns inside those provinces. A registered address elsewhere needs a reason.

Company identity is free to verify. Every registered Chinese company holds an 18-digit Unified Social Credit Code, and the government's GSXT portal confirms the name, registered capital, business scope and whether the licence is current. The business scope field is the one to read, since it states whether the company manufactures or trades.

Product fit is the third check. A workshop whose whole page is jersey basics will accept your structured jacket and learn the pattern on your order.

Ten survivors is about right for the email stage. The replies do most of the remaining filtering by themselves: some will answer every question you asked, some will answer half of them, and a good number will not reply at all.

That leaves three finalists. Before real money moves, one of the three wants a visit or a third-party audit. Both of those are covered further down.

Trade shows collapse this whole sequence into two days when the timing works. The Canton Fair runs twice a year in Guangzhou with tens of thousands of exhibitors, Intertextile Shanghai does the fabric side, and MAGIC in Las Vegas and Texworld cover the US. Bring drawings and a fabric swatch, then watch which people can talk construction standing at the booth.

Doing all of this yourself costs weeks of your own time plus the travel if you visit. A sourcing agent takes it off your hands. The two fee models: a commission takes a percentage of every order you ever place, and a flat fee bills once. Factory groups quote from their own members with the fee already inside the unit price. Their numbers are hard to set against a direct quote.

Ask early whether you are talking to a factory or an agent, since the answer tells you who signs for a bad batch. The thing no reply settles is whether the floor they describe is the floor your order runs on. A visit settles it. An audit settles it.

02the arithmetic

How many units you can order.

The mill sets your floor, not the factory.

Do this before the first email goes out, because the number it produces is the one your ten candidates need from you.

Take your garment and find out how much fabric it uses. Work in metres and convert once at the end, since most of the world's mills quote that way. A tee runs about 1.4 metres, a shirt closer to 1.8, a lined jacket 2.7 or more. In yards that is roughly 1.5, 2 and 3. Your pattern maker gives you the exact figure. Before you have one, the category average will do.

Worth getting right, since it is the one input on your side of the table. A wider sleeve, a longer body or a bigger print repeat that has to match across seams all push consumption up. Pulling it back down is the cutter's job, through the marker: the layout used to nest pattern pieces into the width of the cloth. On a 1.5-metre width, a good marker might take consumption from 1.45 metres to 1.32. Across 500 units that is 65 metres of cloth you never buy. Ask any factory quoting you what marker efficiency they assume. The ones who know will tell you a percentage.

Fabric suppliers will quote you a minimum per colourway if you call three of them. Answers vary widely. Stock knits come back lowest. Greige and stock wovens sit above them. Anything the mill has to warp or dye specially sits above that. Ask each of the three for the stock minimum and the custom-dye minimum separately, because the gap between those two numbers decides whether you can have the colour you wanted. American and some Indian mills answer in yards, so convert before the figure goes anywhere near your consumption number.

Divide the mill minimum by the consumption, in whichever unit you converted to. A mill wanting 500 yards for a garment that uses 1.5 puts your floor at 333 units per colourway. Order 200 against that and you have bought 133 units of cloth that will sit in the factory. Any factory MOQ quoted under your floor ignores where the cloth comes from. Run the sum on the numbers your three mills actually give you.

Trims carry minimums of their own, outside that calculation and often above it. Woven labels, branded aglets and custom hardware each carry a setup cost the supplier has to spread. Ask for those numbers alongside the fabric ones.

Factory MOQs then read against your own floor. Two things push them up. A large export factory loses more by stopping a line than a ten-machine workshop does. Some categories also need equipment that has to earn its keep. Denim carries a wash house and specialist hardware where jersey runs on a threaded machine. A denim minimum therefore sits above a tee minimum at the same factory.

A factory quoting 100 on fabric that starts at 333 is doing one of two things. It might be quoting past its own supply. You would find that out after the deposit had gone. Or it is planning to buy the full 500 yards, cut your 100, and hold the balance against future orders from you or from someone else. Holding stock is a legitimate way to run a small line and it costs money. That cost is sitting somewhere in the unit price you were quoted. Ask which of the two it is, and ask what the 500-yard purchase costs them to sit on.

03first contact

What to put in the first email.

Six lines. Each one filters.

1. One sentence on the garment, with a reference image.
2. Your quantity, using the floor you calculated.
3. Their MOQ per style and per colourway.
4. Whether they are a factory or an agent.
5. Their business registration number.
6. What they charge for a sample.

Replies land over about a fortnight, most of them answering three or four of the six and skipping the registration.

04the filter

Reading the replies.

What a message declines to answer is the answer.

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

Three things in one message, none of them about the writer's English. MOQ 100 as a single figure answers in the shape you wanted and leaves out the per-colourway number their machines actually run to. The push to WhatsApp moves the conversation onto a phone app where the record stays thin. And 100 per cent upfront is a term any factory with a track record can afford to skip.

Three more belong in the same category. They show up later. An MOQ that climbs after you commit is that number being renegotiated with your deposit already in play. An address on the quote that differs from the business registration points to an intermediary. Lapsed audit certificates say the last buyer stopped checking.

Once a factory is close to taking real money off you, pay someone to go and look at it. SGS, Bureau Veritas, Intertek and QIMA price by man-day. None of them publishes a rate card. A basic social audit is one day on site. Ask two of them for a quote on your specific factory and country. Full SA8000 certification runs several days and costs a multiple of that.

Ask for certificates by name, since "we are certified" on its own does not say which scheme. On the social side you want BSCI, WRAP, SMETA or SA8000. For quality systems, ISO 9001. For the cloth itself, GOTS, GRS or OEKO-TEX.

05the numbers

Comparing quotes.

Three single numbers compare on price alone.

Send all three factories the same request: break the price into fabric, trims, cut-make-trim, decoration, labels, packaging, sampling, testing and freight. Separate lines let you cut a colourway or adjust size depth later and reprice only what changed.

Confirm the incoterm on each. Terms have to match before a comparison means anything. Under EXW the factory's job ends at its own door with the boxes stacked. Collection, export paperwork, freight, insurance and duty all fall to you, to arrange and to pay for.

FOB buys you three more legs: export customs, the truck to the port, and loading onto the vessel. Once the goods are on board, the ocean freight, marine insurance, import clearance and duty are yours.

Convert all three to landed cost per unit: the quote plus freight, duty, and the months your money spends in transit. On that basis a cheap FOB price funded six months early often loses to a dearer one from a workshop down the road.

06the spec

What goes in a tech pack.

The first sample reflects exactly what you put in it.

Include flat sketches, a measurement chart with tolerances by size, a bill of materials naming fabrics by composition and weight and trims by supplier and part number, construction notes calling out seam types and stitch counts, label and care placement, and packing instructions.

Name a seam type and you get that seam. "Topstitch here" gets you single-needle at 3mm, or twin-needle at 6mm, depending on what the last order through that machine wanted.

Most first tech packs are too thin. You find out which parts by reading the first sample against them. Nobody writes a complete one from scratch.

07the rounds

Sampling.

Proto, fit, then the one cut on the production line.

Ask for the sample charge and the turnaround in the first email. Both vary by an order of magnitude between a jersey tee and a lined coat. Budget for one to three rounds before a fit is signed off.

Order a proto sample first. It tests the pattern. The fit sample after it gets checked on a body against your graded measurements. Last comes the pre-production sample, the PP sample, made on the actual production line with the actual bulk fabric.

The sample room puts its best machinist on the first two. What comes back is a ceiling. Your goods get sewn on the line by whoever is working that shift. The PP sample is what tests for that.

The deposit buys the bulk fabric. The fabric arrives after the deposit. The PP sample is cut from it. Approve that sample before bulk cutting starts, and hold the balance until the goods pass inspection.

Feedback works when it arrives as measurements. "Sleeve 2cm long at size M, correct across the size run" is a work order. An adjective like "sleeves feel long" comes back as a question. On a factory in another timezone that round trip costs about a week.

Three rounds at 25 days each is two and a half months before anything goes into production.

08the money

Payment terms.

What each half is tied to matters more than the split.

Everyone quotes 30/70. On a first order you will hear 50/50 instead.

The negotiation runs the same way most times. The moves are worth knowing. The factory opens at 50 or higher because your delivery history is empty. Counter on the trigger. When each half moves matters more than how it divides. Push the deposit to contract signing, where it buys fabric and a slot on the line. Sit on the balance until somebody independent has inspected the goods and a clean bill of lading is in your hands.

Terms loosen with delivery history. Expect the deposit share to come down after two or three runs that shipped clean, at which point the three-way split is worth asking for: 30 per cent deposit, 60 per cent after inspection, 10 per cent retained for 30 days after receipt. That last slice covers the faults you find after opening the cartons.

The rework clause belongs in the same contract. A batch that misses AQL gets reworked or replaced at the factory's cost, inside a stated window, with the ship date held.

09quality

Inspections.

Book two. The one before cutting can still stop the run.

Most brands buy one inspection, at the end of production, by which point the cloth is cut.

Textiles inspect badly compared with other consumer goods, at least in the one dataset anybody publishes. QIMA reports quarterly on its own inspection book, and in its Q3 2017 barometer it put textiles at the worst failure rate of the categories it covers, with around 40 per cent of items inspected that quarter falling outside limits. Two things qualify that number. Nine years have passed and QIMA has not published a comparable category breakdown since. And "outside limits" means outside the AQL the buyer set, so a strict buyer generates failures a lenient one would not.

Against that, the arithmetic of two inspections is straightforward. Both cost about the same, a couple of man-days each, but they buy different things. The one before cutting can still stop the run, so a shade problem found at the roll is a phone call to the mill. The one at the end reports on goods that already exist. Find the same shade problem there and you are paying for a re-cut.

Book the first before cutting, with a percentage of the bulk rolls checked on the 4-point system for shade band, weight, width and visible defects. Defects score 1 point up to three inches, 2 points to six, 3 points to nine and 4 beyond that, with no single defect scoring more than 4 and no single linear yard penalised more than 4. Anything within an inch of the selvedge is disregarded. Book the second at the end, run at AQL 2.5 and General Inspection Level II. The tables come from ASQ/ANSI Z1.4 and its ISO twin, ISO 2859-1, both descended from the old MIL-STD-105E. It fixes how many pieces the inspector pulls and how many faults the batch is allowed. AQL 2.5 on a 1,000-piece order means the inspector looks at 80 garments and can accept up to five with major defects.

10the first run

How big the first order should be.

Smallest quantity that clears your floor.

You are testing the factory here as much as the product. Keep it to the smallest quantity that clears the floor you worked out earlier.

Five hundred units of an unproven design means whatever sells slowly is sitting in a warehouse holding your capital.

Ask whether the minimum is two-tier. A factory setting 300 per order and 60 per style lets five styles at 60 each clear the threshold.

Stay on stock fabrics in stock colours for the first run. Both the mill minimum and the dye-lot wait drop away. What you give up is the colour you had in mind.

Keep 15 per cent of the budget back. Fabric prices move between quote and order, samples need recutting, and air freight gets used when the sea booking slips.

11the paperwork

Contract terms and labelling.

A sentence each before the deposit. A lot longer afterwards.

Payment terms are one clause among several the purchase order needs. They take a sentence each to write before the deposit.

Put the governing law and the forum for disputes on the PO. A contract with a Chinese supplier and no arbitration clause leaves you litigating in a provincial court, in Chinese, over an order that may be worth less than the travel to get there. CIETAC in Beijing and HKIAC in Hong Kong both handle apparel disputes and both enforce across borders. Naming one of them takes a sentence in the PO.

The purchase order should also say who owns the pattern. The factory digitised your block. Absent a clause, the graded pattern sits on their server and can be cut for someone else. The clause you want says the patterns, markers and tech pack remain yours. Add a term stopping them selling the design to another buyer.

Labelling comes next. Unlike the clauses above, it is regulated by statute. US law requires most textile and wool products to carry fibre content by generic name and percentage by weight, the country of origin, and the identity of the manufacturer or the business responsible, under the Textile Fiber Products Identification Act. Care instructions are a separate rule, 16 CFR Part 423. Origin marking has to survive normal wear and washing. In practice that means a sewn or printed label at the neck. Get the label wrong and the goods can be held at the port.

Selling into the EU or the UK swaps one rulebook for another. Regulation (EU) 1007/2011 governs fibre names and composition, and it is narrower than the American version: fibre content by approved name, plus a declaration of any non-textile parts of animal origin, and that is the mandatory list. Care symbols are voluntary under EN ISO 3758. Retailers ask for them. Country of origin and manufacturer identity fall under customs rules and member-state law. Britain kept the same regulation on its own statute book after leaving the EU. A garment labelled for one usually satisfies the other.

One thing to note on the EU side. Legal responsibility for correct labelling sits with whoever first places the product on the EU market. As importer, that is you. The factory that sewed the label in carries none of it.

Labelling is the visible half of compliance. Testing is the rest. It applies whether or not anyone asks at the border.

Every clothing textile sold in the US has to meet 16 CFR 1610, the General Wearing Apparel Standard, which the CPSC enforces. A 45-degree flame test sorts fabric into three classes. Class 3 is prohibited for clothing outright. Certain fabrics are exempt by construction and weight. A plain heavy cotton may need no test at all. A brushed lightweight will. Get the test report from the mill at fabric approval, since a report on the wrong colourway or a different finish covers nothing.

Children's clothing carries a second layer. Sleepwear falls under 16 CFR 1615 and 1616, which are stricter than 1610: garments have to self-extinguish, with seams and trim tested alongside the fabric. CPSIA adds lead and phthalate limits, third-party testing at an accredited lab, and a Children's Product Certificate. Drawstrings at the neck of children's outerwear have their own rule. They come up often in recalls.

California's Proposition 65 sits outside all of that and applies to anything sold in the state. In apparel it usually comes up in the trim: lead and cadmium in zips, snaps, buckles and coated prints, and phthalates in plastisol. Ask the factory for the trim supplier's test reports, not just the fabric's.

Selling into Europe brings a further layer that has nothing to do with labels. France and the Netherlands already run extended producer responsibility schemes for textiles. These put an end-of-life fee on each garment placed on the market and require registration before you sell, with other member states following. The ESPR framework adds a Digital Product Passport for textiles. Both obligations land on whoever places the goods on the market.

Customs decides country of origin. Your marketing has no say in it. Where the yarn was spun and where the cloth was woven can both matter. Under USMCA's yarn-forward rule they decide whether your garment enters Canada or Mexico duty-free.

12admissibility

Forced labour and UFLPA.

Duty is a bill. This one decides whether the goods come in at all.

CBP treats cotton, yarn and apparel at every stage of processing as a priority enforcement sector, for the straightforward reason that Xinjiang grows roughly 85 per cent of China's cotton. Fibre from there is spun, blended and traded through mills across Asia, so it turns up in cloth that never passed through Xinjiang and in garments sewn in Vietnam, Bangladesh or Cambodia. CBP has detained shipments from all three.

The mechanism works the other way round from most customs rules. Goods made wholly or in part in Xinjiang, or by any company on the UFLPA Entity List, are presumed to be made with forced labour and presumed inadmissible. The burden of proof is yours once the container is flagged. To get a detained container released you have to demonstrate by clear and convincing evidence that the goods were not, and that standard sits well above the balance of probabilities used in most civil matters. It takes a documented trace from the finished garment back through every tier to the raw fibre.

The list moves. It follows companies wherever they operate. DHS announced 43 additions on 31 July 2026, effective 3 August, the largest single expansion since the statute took effect, and trade counsel put the resulting total at 187 entities across aluminium, apparel, copper, cotton and tomatoes. The presumption attaches to the company, so goods from a listed firm are presumed barred even where the firm operates nowhere near Xinjiang and the shipment contains no Xinjiang material.

Those figures date from August 2026 and the list is revised several times a year, so check the DHS page before you rely on any number here. The list itself is the only version that counts.

At the point you place an order this means four things. Put cotton origin in the purchase order as a warranty, with the mill named and the fibre traceable to a country of harvest. Ask for the spinning mill and not just the fabric supplier, because the trace has to reach the fibre. Check the current Entity List against every company in that chain, including the ones your factory buys from. And treat the ability to name a yarn source as a condition of shipping to the United States, whatever the sample looks like.

13the tariff

Duty and classification.

Classify the garment before you order it.

The HTS code follows from all of that. The arithmetic can turn on it. Apparel duty in the US runs from a few per cent to over thirty depending on fibre, construction and gender. China-origin goods may carry Section 301 tariffs on top. Classify the garment before you order it. A 32 per cent rate found at the port can take the margin out of an order that priced well.

14the run

During production.

Five moments where the factory sends photographs.

Once the deposit clears you stop seeing what is happening. Agree in advance on five moments where the factory sends photographs.

Rolls arriving is the first, doubling as the pre-cut inspection. Then the cutting floor. These are the ones to look at closely, since shade, fabric and lay plan all show up in a photograph of a cut lay, days before anything is sewn. Somewhere around the fiftieth garment off the line, ask again, because that is when you find out whether the PP sample transferred to the people actually sewing. The fourth is inspection, the one that gates your balance. The fifth is the container being loaded. The bill of lading that comes with it releases your money.

Put one name on each side of the correspondence and confirm every phone call in writing afterwards. Factories move fast and forget conversations. A one-line email after each call costs nothing and settles arguments later.

Pay a day before the deadline. Accounts that run themselves get quoted better terms next time.

Tell them the quantity you actually expect, even when a bigger number makes the quote look better. A factory that priced for 500 and got an order for 150 will run it once. Your next quote comes from what happened.

Straight answers.