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Founder guide

What goes into a tech pack, and why factories ask for one

“Do I need a tech pack before I contact a clothing manufacturer?” is a standing question in every founder forum. The short answer: yes, if you want to be quoted accurately, sampled correctly, and answered at all.

What a tech pack actually is

A tech pack is the instruction set for your garment. It turns “I want a premium hoodie” into something a factory can price, cut, sew, and inspect without guessing. Think of it as the contract between the idea in your head and the product on the rail. When bulk arrives wrong, the pack settles the argument: either the factory missed what it says, or the problem was never in it.

Factories ask for one for a practical reason. They cannot quote from a sketch or a moodboard. A drawing shows a silhouette, not what the fabric is, how heavy, how the seams are built, what the chest measures, or which trims to buy. Without those answers, a factory either declines, quotes a guess padded against risk, or fills the gaps with its defaults. The response numbers tell the same story: in one widely cited survey, brands submitting a complete tech pack heard back from 74 percent of manufacturers contacted. Brands submitting a sketch alone heard back from 12 percent.

What goes in one, section by section

A complete pack for one style covers:

• Overview and technical flats. Front, back, and detail drawings of the garment, flat and to proportion, with every feature visible: pockets, closures, stitching, branding.
• Bill of materials. Every material and trim, itemised: fabric, lining, zips, buttons, drawcords, elastic, labels, packaging, each specced, with a supplier or approved equivalent where it matters.
• Fabric specification. Composition, weight in GSM, finish, colour, and performance requirements. “Soft premium fabric” is a wish. “Brushed fleece, 80 percent cotton, 20 percent polyester, 320 GSM” is an instruction.
• Points of measure. The garment’s measurements, point by point, for the base size: chest, length, sleeve, shoulder, and the rest, each defined by where the tape goes.
• Construction. How it is sewn: seam types, stitch counts, where reinforcement goes, how hems and cuffs are finished. Construction is where quality lives, and where cheap quotes quietly cut.
• Artwork and branding. Print and embroidery artwork, sizes, placements measured from defined points, and colour references.
• Labels and packaging. Care and content labels with the legally required information, brand label placement, and how the garment is folded, bagged, and boxed.
• Tolerances and grading. How much variation from spec is acceptable, in numbers, and how measurements scale across your size range. Grading is its own discipline: get it wrong and a good medium produces a bad extra large.
• Revision history. Every change, dated and versioned, so the factory always builds from the current pack.

What a tech pack is not

It is not a moodboard, a sketch, or a reference photo on its own. A reference garment can genuinely help: a real product, annotated with notes like “4 centimetres longer, with a firmer neck rib,” is a workable brief to build a pack from. What does not work is sending the photo and expecting the factory to reverse engineer your intentions. That makes the factory your design studio, a very expensive one, paid for in sample rounds: two to three rounds per style is normal, four or five means the problem is upstream, in the pack. Founders who skip the pack do not save its cost. They pay it later, in revisions and delays.

How detailed is detailed enough

Detailed enough that a competent factory, given only the document, builds the garment you meant, in the base size, without asking a question whose answer changes the price. Every measurement that matters gets a number, and every material a spec. Where you are flexible, say so: that gives the factory room to save you money. Where it must match, a logo placement, a fabric weight, a fit measurement, set a tolerance, so “close enough” is defined before a dispute, not during one.

You do not have to draw it yourself

Most founders cannot produce a pack, and are not expected to. Technical designers do this as a trade, and freelance help for a first pack commonly runs a few hundred dollars per style, which founders in the forums describe as money they should have spent earlier. What you bring is the decisions: the product, the customer, the price, the fit references, the non negotiables. What the technical designer brings is the translation into factory language. Our tech pack work runs the same way, with the technical and fit specialists in our network, inside a bigger question we ask first: whether the range, the price, and the minimums make this style worth packing at all.

How we help

Tech packs are one line in our capabilities because we have lived downstream of them at every scale, from a 500 plus SKU brand built from zero, where we wrote the briefs and owned the outcomes, to a single classification taken apart spec by spec until every version had a distinct job. If you are about to contact factories, the pack is the first deliverable worth paying for. If you want yours made by people who will also tell you when a style should not be made at all, email [email protected], or use the contact form.