How Clothes Are Manufactured: Fibre to Your Distribution Centre

This page sits under the sourcing-first guide to starting a clothing brand and is written for a founder rather than a textile engineer. Knowing how clothes are manufactured matters commercially, not academically: it shows you where your money and your calendar actually go, and both are concentrated in stages most people never think about. Sewing — the stage everyone pictures — is about four weeks of a sixteen-week chain and roughly 19% of the cost of a basic tee.

How clothes are manufactured: the clothing manufacturing process stage by stage

Every stage from fibre to your DC, with typical duration and the thing that goes wrong. Durations are for a basic cotton knit programme at an Asian export factory; complex wovens and washed denim run longer at nearly every stage.

Two things stand out. Wet processing is the long pole, not sewing. And the two stages where a brand can actually intervene — colour approval and the pre-production sample — both sit before the bulk is cut.

Fibre, yarn and fabric: where 51% of the garment cost is created

On the canonical cost sheet for a 180 gsm cotton jersey crew tee at $4.30 FOB, fabric is $2.20 — 51.2% of the factory price. Trims and packaging are $0.45, sewing labour $0.80, factory overhead $0.32 and margin $0.53. So half the cost of your garment is decided before anyone touches a sewing machine.

Spinning sets the hand of the fabric. Rotor (open-end) spinning is three to five times faster and is the baseline cost; ring spinning costs 20-30% more and produces a smoother, stronger yarn; compact spinning adds 40-60%. Combing is a separate axis and removes 12-20% of the fibre by weight as short-fibre noil. "Combed ring-spun" is the standard premium tee spec, and it is why two tees at the same GSM feel different. Yarn count is stated in Ne, where higher is finer: 30s is the standard tee count.

Knitting or weaving produces greige (undyed) fabric. Single jersey is the tee fabric and curls at cut edges; piqué is the polo fabric; brushed loopback fleece at 320 gsm is the standard hoodie. Note that GSM is measured on finished, relaxed, conditioned fabric, and greige GSM differs from finished GSM by 5-15% — a real source of disputes. The detail is in reading a fabric spec: GSM, yarn count and spinning.

Quantity check. A size medium tee consumes 0.27 kg of finished dyed fabric including about 10% cutting wastage. Ten thousand tees therefore need 2.7 tonnes of fabric and 15-16 cotton bales. That is the physical reason minimums exist.

Wet processing: the stage that sets your lead time

Dyeing and finishing is where the calendar is won or lost. Colour must be approved before it is produced: lab dips take 5-10 business days per round, and two to three rounds are standard, four to five for saturated reds, neons and deep navies. Approval happens in a light booth under a specified illuminant against a current Pantone TCX standard, with a stated Delta E formula and tolerance — non-standard lighting is cited in 30-40% of disputed lab-dip rejections.

Then the mill has to fill a vessel. A dye lot typically needs 300-500 kg of fabric per custom colour, because below the minimum load the liquor ratio is wrong and shade reproducibility fails. That is the origin of the MOQ you were quoted per colourway.

Three dyeing routes, and they behave differently:

• Yarn dye — colour applied before knitting. Required for stripes, checks and heathers. Highest minimum, best consistency.
• Piece dye — the fabric roll is dyed. The default for solid colours: 500-1,000 m per colour, roughly 250-500 garments.
• Garment dye — the finished garment is dyed. Minimums of 50-200 pieces, more batch variation, softer hand, about 3% additional shrinkage tolerance and 3-5 days added.

Finishing then does the unglamorous work that decides whether your customer complains: compacting mechanically pre-shrinks cotton knits so residual shrinkage lands inside a typical ±3% tolerance. Specify "compacted" and a target residual shrinkage, or you will receive untreated fabric that shrinks 5.0-7.5%.

Cutting and sewing: where the labour cost is

Cutting starts with a marker — the nesting layout of all pattern pieces. Marker efficiency of 80-88% is normal on knits, and the 8-12% that falls outside it is the wastage already built into that 0.27 kg per tee. Fabric is spread in plies, cut with a band knife or automatic cutter, then bundled by size and colour.

Sewing is measured in standard minutes. A basic t-shirt is about 8.5 SMV, a short-sleeve polo 10.4, a hoodie 21.0 and a formal full-sleeve shirt 22.3. The cost formula is CM = SMV × cost-per-minute ÷ line efficiency, and line efficiency is the variable factories quietly vary: quoting at 100% rather than a realistic 60-75% understates labour by a third or more.

Stitch class matters as much as stitch count. On a standard tee, shoulder and side seams are 504 three-thread overlock, the neck rib is attached with 504 and the tape topstitched with 301 or 406, and sleeve and bottom hems are 406 two-needle coverstitch at 10-13 stitches per inch. Writing the stitch class into the tech pack is what stops a factory substituting a cheaper single-needle lockstitch hem that cracks on the first wear.

How shirts are manufactured: the extra operations a woven shirt needs

A woven shirt is a different manufacturing problem from a knit, and the difference is not just the fabric. Three families of operation exist on a shirt line that do not exist on a tee line.

Fusing. Interlining is heat-bonded under pressure to the collar, collar band, cuffs and front placket to give them structure. This needs a fusing press with controlled temperature, pressure and dwell time, plus a bond-strength test after washing. Get it wrong and the collar bubbles or delaminates in the customer's wardrobe — a defect that appears weeks after inspection passed.

Collar and cuff making. The collar is run-stitched, trimmed, turned, pointed, pressed and topstitched before it ever meets the body, then the band is attached and the two must align symmetrically. A collar point 2 mm out on one side is visible from across a room.

Pressing. A tee is folded; a shirt is pressed on a form or a steam tunnel and then folded over a board with clips and tissue, or hung. Pressing is a real operation with its own labour and its own damage risk.

How shirts are manufactured differently from tees, in the numbers that matter to your quote.

That SMV difference is the whole reason a shirt costs two to three times what a tee costs to make, and the tighter tolerance is why shirt fit problems surface in bulk after passing on a sample.

Inspection, packing and the border

Inspection is normally a final random inspection at 80% packed, to ANSI/ASQ Z1.4 (equivalent to ISO 2859-1), General Inspection Level II, single sampling, normal severity, at the apparel convention of Critical 0 / Major 2.5 / Minor 4.0. On a 5,000-piece lot the inspector draws 200 pieces and accepts up to 10 major defects. In other words, up to 5.0% of the inspected sample can be defective and the lot still passes — AQL is a commercial risk threshold, not a quality target. See AQL inspection for brand owners.

Packing turns garments into a shipping unit: fold, polybag with the required suffocation warning, carton by size ratio, and mark. A polybagged tee is about 0.0015 CBM, so 1,000 tees is roughly 1.5 CBM and a 40ft high-cube container holds about 20,000-25,000 of them.

The border is a stage, not an afterthought. The ISF is due 24 hours before lading at the foreign port, and the entry, classification and duty payment happen while the goods are on the water. Under 19 CFR 102.21 the cut-and-sew country is almost always the country of origin for apparel, regardless of where the fibre or fabric came from — which is why stage 6, not stage 1, sets your duty rate. The full cost stack is in landed cost for apparel imports.

How the stages add up to 10-16 weeks PO to FOB

Where the lead time comes from on a first order. The left column is the nominal duration of each stage; the observed 10-16 week PO-to-FOB figure for India and Bangladesh includes overlap between stages and normal slippage, so the two are not the same arithmetic.

The published planning figures to use are 10-16 weeks PO to FOB for India and Bangladesh, 15-20 weeks PO to a US DC from India and 18-23 weeks from Bangladesh. Globally, first orders run 12-20 weeks PO to FOB. Repeat orders compress to 8-12 weeks PO to FOB because sampling disappears from the front of the chain — which is the single biggest argument for keeping a style in the range rather than replacing it.

Then subtract for the calendar: Diwali in India, two Eids in Bangladesh, Tết in Vietnam and Chinese New Year each remove one to four effective weeks. The development stages that sit before week 0 are covered in the sampling calendar from proto to TOP, the commercial models in how to source apparel direct from factories, and every term used here in the Yarnstick glossary of sourcing and trade terms.

Frequently asked questions