With the passage of time and the regular changes of the seasons each years, everyone will regularly change their clothing batch by batch, which also leads to huge business opportunities in the clothing and fashion industry. In addition to the long-standing clothing brands occupying 70% of the global clothing market, a large number of new clothing brands join the fashion industry every year to compete, which also leads to product homogenization and fierce price competition.

If you just a start-up brand or planning to build a new brand, how to find a better clothing manufacturer to start or continue your business, will be very essential.

Before seeking a garment manufacturer, first of all, clear positioning is necessary.

• Knitted product or wove one?
• Sport wear or leisure wears?
• For outdoor wearing or daily fashion wearing?

Because different garment manufacturers have advantages and disadvantages. If you need sport wears, then must find sport wears manufacturer. Fabric, machine and production techniques will be different, it will effect the cost and quality directly.

Secondly, it is necessary to understand the structure of the factory,as many clothing factories consider cost factors and do not establish development departments, printing departments and quality inspection departments, which cannot form a closed-loop production chain. Some processes need to be outsourced.This can directly lead to issues such as poor communication, incomplete supply chain, and unable to provide you with effective design suggestions.

For sure, if you have your own design team and relatively mature supply chain, you can simply find clothing factories with relatively simple structures to coordinate your own supply chain resources, which can also reduce overall processing costs.
One the contrary, if your team is currently in the development stage and lacks design, products, and other aspects, then a factory with a relatively completed structure is very suitable for you. It can not only assist in designing and customizing brand services, but also have strong material suppliers as support (usually these material suppliers do not cooperate with individuals).

Therefore, after you clear of your brand positioning, when searching for a factory, you will be more purposeful, which can save a lot of time.

Domestic localized production or oversea clothing manufacturers’ production have their own advantages and disadvantages. It is necessary to consider the actual situation of the brand and determine which option can achieve maximum benefits through comprehensive calculations.

• Local Garment Manufacturer

Localized production, if you live in Europe and the United States, find factories in the United States, Italy Poland that have strong production and R&D capabilities. The quality of the development process and large goods are relatively guaranteed. Moreover, localized production, communication and transportation are relatively efficient. However,due to the high salary structure, the cost of a single piece of clothing will be much higher than those in China, Vietnam, Turkey and other developing countries.

• Oversea Garment Manufacturer

There are many choices for overseas clothing manufacturers, with 70% of their productivity concentrated in Asia. For example, Vietnam, Cambodia, India and others in China and Southeast Asia are all strong clothing manufacturing countries.

Base on comprehensive strength selection, considering factors such as business enviroment, social stability, wokers’professionalism, and upstream and downstream supply chains, China is undoubtedly your best choice compared to Southeast Asia countries. If you only consider cost issues, then the advantages of Southeast Asian countries are very significant, after all, the salary level and factory rental costs in Southeast Asia are not high.

If you consider intuitive factors such as clothing production quality, communication efficiency, and development support, it is recommended that you choose a Chinese clothing manufacturer with a production and service level between European and American countries and Southeast Asian countries, which can provide a relatively balanced point for your early development.

• Clothing Fair

Find the suppliers face to face is the best way, you just need to attend to local or global famous clothing fair, must have lost of sources, like Frankfurt Fashion Fair.

Knowing the type of manufacturer directly, which type of clients they work with, factory scale, and the supports they offered. This directly communication will save 70% of your time, and those manufacturers on the Fair all with experience and strength.

For sure,the MOQ from clothing manufacturers on the Fair will be quite high, if you just a start-up and order quantity is few hundreds per designs, it would be hard to find a manufacturer who accept your order, this is a problem of match, will be clarified next.

• Searching Engine

Use searching engine like Google or Bing, to find clothing manufacturers from any countries. If you enter “clothing manufacturer”, or “T-shirt manufacturer”, there will have multiple webs of supplier for selection.

You can pick some target manufacturers for comparison, even though it takes time and energy, but still a good way.

Find the manufacturers online, you need to check whether they update the web from time to time, and make sure the truth of the web to avoid any cheats or found a wrong manufacturers, waist time and money. Try to choose manufacturers who appear formal and with comprehensive introduction.

• Online Catalogue

Each country or region will have an online catalog with detailed enterprise introductions and business introductions, that not only can find the factory as you want, but you can also have a more authentic understanding of each companies through the ratings of netizens, as a reference standard for yourself. For example, the well-known local online directory “Yelp” in the United States.

• Forum

The well-known forums like Quora and Reddit, which have a lot users and they all love to share. From those forums you can find some posts related to clothing manufacturing, browse a list of clothing manufacturers recommended by fashion designers and brand founders, or consult posts on precautions before starting a clothing production line, which can help you quickly and accurately find the right factory.

After all, borrowing the successful experience of others can help your clothing brand grow faster.

• Social Media

On huge social media platform like Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, will have lots of garment manufacturers to help to make your designs.Most importantly, the social platform will have the latest trends of manufactures, which can effectively narrow the distance and at the same time, it will let you have a quick understanding of different manufacturers.

Cooperation is two- way. You have the right to choose the manufacturer, and the manufacturer also has right to choose whether to cooperate with you or not. Thinking clearly about the following six points will help you make decisions faster.

• Matching degree

The founder of any clothing brand wants to cooperate with big company with the advantages of standardized production process, compliance with international moral standards, perfect quality control system, combination of high-quality talents and automated production line. However, the premise of this cooperation must be equal, that is, you have a stable number of orders, each orders has 10,000pcs or more, and can more orders, which is the most basic condition of cooperation.

If your qty only few hundreds or thousands, 99% of those big company will not give you any cooperation opportunities or even feed back.

So you should match the company scale according to order quantity. After your brand develops and the order quantity comes up, you can consider upgrading your supply chain.

• Experience of manufacturer

Good Design can only be achieved by experienced manufacturers.

Whether the details of designs can be 99% realized, mainly depends on the experience of the manufacturer. For the basic pattern, experience paper pattern-maker slightly adjust the paper pattern then it can be perfect. Or else, even though you give 10 chances, but finally still wasting your time.

Experience is built-up by time.

The more goods the factory makes, the more experience it has, have a stronger ability to avoid quality problems and fix them in time.

Longer times running business means richer management experience, smoother and more perfect production process, then high-quality talents will increased.

Therefore, it is generally not recommended to cooperate wit garment manufacturers who with less then 10 years experience.

• Is it a closed production process good enough?

The closed production process means that raw material , knitting, dyeing, sewing, printing or embroidery to final inspection and packaging can be completed in the factory, or whether there are excellent manufacturer who can manage the whole processes and delivery 100% qualified products without wasting your time and energy.

This is very important for selecting suppliers, because in your early development stage, your focus should be on product design and marketing, 90% of production suggestion should be handed over to the manufacturer. If the manufacturer you found only provide cutting, sewing, quality inspection etc., but can not provide printing and embroidery services, it will take times to find suppliers to work with, which will seriously affect the speed and confident to move forward.

Therefore, the ideal clothing manufacturer must be able to involve in every link of production and provide one-stop service.

• Quality and price

Quality is important, but not the main standard to select suppliers, especial for those beginners.

We need to keep this in mind, good quality clothing, price must be higher. At the beginning, it was wrong to take the quality of international brands as the reference standard for your products. Because of their high premium and price, the fabrics, accessories and processes used in production of these brands must be the top in the world, which directly affects the cost of clothing and greatly affects the product efficiency.

It is suggested that the medium and high-end quality manufacturer, together with appropriate price, is the best choice for development at any stage. This requires you to go through multiple rounds of inquiry and proofing for different factories before you finally have the opportunity to find the ideal factory.

About quality, here, we need to update our understanding.

There are still many fashion founders who associated overseas manufacturing with low quality, but this is not true.In many cases, out of concern about the protection of human rights and the environment, 90% of overseas factories are excluded from the selection range. In fact, this is unnecessary. With the development of China, many garment factories have paid attention to and continuously improved the relationship between human rights, environment, quality and production efficiency quality inspection, and have achieved a good balance in terms of price, quality, cultural development and sustainable development. However, if you think these issues are important to your customers, you may still need to narrow your choice to your local manufacturers and finally have to accept the high cost.

About the price, if the quantity you requested is small, then there is no room for bargaining.

For a factory, the workload of manufacturing 20pcs or 20,000pcs is the same. The product development process is consistent, they need to invest a lot of manpower, material resources and time. The expenses incurred in this process need to be allocated to each piece of clothing. Therefore, the specific quantity of the order directly affects the cost of your clothing.

Finally, the right price and good quality are important indicators for you to choose a factory.

• Reaction from manufacturer

>Quick response.

Your doubts, your requests, get the quotation, have a good communication, if the manufacturer keeps you waiting or is not professional enough, it will slow down your plan.

>On-time delivery.

A manufacturer who willing to meet your plan on time or in advance, definitely worth to work with for long time.

>Efficiency of quality problem handling.

It’s hard to 100% avoid quality problems when production, when problems came, can manufacture find the reason and tell you? Then can he provide you a perfect solution? This two points mainly depends on the ability and business philosophy of manufacturer. Therefore, find a reliable manufacturer is difficult.

• Efficiency of shipment

Choose overseas manufacturer, need to take the time and cost of shipment into consideration, put all those into your plan, otherwise there will be many uncontrollable factors come, like miss the best sale time due to late shipment.

Customized clothing, need stocks, MOQ 300pcs per colors. If you need more designs, then means more stock and more money,then it will effect to start the plan.

Under this circumstance, we have 2 solutions.

• Dropshipping

Find the design and cutting from suppliers as you preferred,and put the pictures on your web or social media to sale, then make the profit. No need to prepare goods, no inventory pressure. However, the style and size are developed by the manufacturer, which has great limitations.

• Wholesale

Purchase plain T-shirts from wholesaler, print or embroider your own pattern on it, this is a relatively simple way with low capital requirements, It can quickly own a clothing product line of your own style, and the purchase quantity requirements are relatively low, 20pcs per designs. But the disadvantage is, with fixed design and sizes, not 100% fit the sizes you need.

How to find a good clothing manufacturer?

After the sharing, you must had a clear mind, hope that would be the best help.

USA: indiesource
Europe: createfashionbrand
China: yokeey
Southeast Asia: rightwayapparel