How clothes are manufactured: the whole process, stage by stage

Clothes are manufactured in a fixed order. A brief and a reference image become a technical spec, a pattern is drafted from a block, a first sample is sewn and corrected on the body, the pattern is graded across the size range, the graded pieces are nested into a cutting marker, the fabric is spread and cut, the panels are bundled and sewn along a line of specialist machines, decoration is added at whichever point the method requires, and the finished garments are checked, pressed and packed. Fabric is ordered before anything is cut, and nothing is cut in bulk until a sample has been approved.

The order things happen in

Cut-and-sew manufacturing means the garment is built from cloth. Nobody buys a blank and decorates it. The cloth arrives on a roll, the pattern decides what shape is cut out of it, and a line of machinists turns flat panels into a garment. Everything in this article happens in a factory that works that way.

The order matters more than any single stage. Every step depends on a decision made in the step before it, so a change made late does not just cost time, it invalidates work already done. Change the fabric after grading and the grade may be wrong, because a stiffer cloth needs different ease. Change the print method after the sewing plan is written and the sewing plan changes with it.

Here is the whole chain, with what happens at each stage and what the brand has to decide.

The brief and the reference

Manufacturing starts with a description of a garment that is specific enough to build. It does not need to arrive as a technical drawing. Most briefs arrive as a photograph of something similar, a moodboard, a rough sketch, or a garment the customer owns and wants a version of.

The factory's job at this stage is to convert that into a specification: the points of measure and what each one should read, the fibre content and weight of the cloth, the knit or weave structure, the colourway, the trims, the decoration method and its placement, and the quantity per size. That document is what everyone downstream works from. A brand that supplies its own is ahead. A brand that does not is normal, and our guide to starting a clothing brand in the UK covers what to have ready before the first conversation.

The single most useful thing to send is a garment you already own with notes on what is wrong with it. Longer in the body, tighter through the sleeve, heavier cloth, deeper rib. Measurements taken from a real object beat adjectives, because "oversized" means five different things to five people and 62 cm across the chest means one thing.

Pattern drafting from a block

A pattern is the set of flat shapes that, sewn together, make a three-dimensional garment. It is not traced off a picture. It is drafted.

Patterns are drafted from a block, sometimes called a sloper. A block is a base pattern with no design detail in it at all: a body, a sleeve, a neckline, and the ease that makes it sit correctly. It carries the fit the factory has already proved. A pattern cutter takes the relevant block and manipulates it into the design, adding the seam lines, the pocket bag, the hood panels, the plackets, the cuff and hem shaping, the yokes, the vents.

Two things about a block surprise people. The first is that it belongs to a fabric behaviour, not just to a body. A block that produces a good fit in 240 GSM loopback cotton will not produce the same fit in 400 GSM brushed fleece, because the heavier cloth resists drape and needs different ease at the armhole and the underarm. Change the fabric late and the pattern has to be revisited. Our streetwear fabric guide sets out what each weight and structure actually does on the body.

The second is that the pattern carries far more than outlines. Seam allowance is added to every edge, and it is not uniform: a hem that will be turned twice needs more than a shoulder seam that will be overlocked. Notches are cut into the edges so a machinist knows which point on a sleeve head meets which point on an armhole. Grainlines are marked so every piece is cut in the same direction as the cloth. Drill holes mark pocket corners. Piece names, size and cut quantity are printed on each one. Most of this work is now done in pattern CAD rather than on card, but the discipline is unchanged.

The first pattern and the toile

The first pattern is the first complete attempt at the design. Before it is cut in the real cloth, it is often made up as a toile: a test garment in a cheap fabric chosen to behave like the intended one. Calico for a woven, an inexpensive jersey or fleece for a knit.

The toile exists to answer shape questions cheaply. Is the armhole sitting where it should. Does the hood stand up or collapse. Is the pocket in the right place when the wearer's hands are actually in it. Does the sleeve twist. These are the faults that are obvious on a body and invisible on a screen, and finding them in calico costs a metre of cheap cloth rather than a metre of the fabric that took six weeks to knit.

On simple garments in familiar blocks, a factory may skip the toile and go straight to a sample in the real fabric. On anything with unusual construction, a new silhouette, or a fabric nobody has drafted for before, skipping it is a false economy.

Fabric, knitted or woven to order

Fabric is normally the longest single wait in the whole process, and it is ordered before anything is cut. Cloth is one of two structures, and the difference decides how the garment behaves.

Knitted fabric is made from loops of yarn on a circular knitting machine. Jersey, loopback or French terry, brushed fleece, rib, interlock and pique are all knits. Stretch comes from the loop structure itself, so a knit can stretch without any elastane in it. Almost all t-shirts, hoodies, sweatshirts and joggers are knits.

Woven fabric is made on a loom by interlacing warp and weft at right angles. Twill, denim, canvas, ripstop, poplin and gabardine are wovens. A woven has almost no stretch unless elastane is spun into the yarn, which is why woven garments need more shaping in the pattern to allow movement.

For a made-to-order run, the cloth is usually knitted or woven for the job rather than pulled off a shelf. It is then dyed to the colourway and finished: brushed, sueded, compacted, pre-shrunk. Three checks happen before it is allowed near the cutting table. A lab dip is approved against the colour reference, so the colour is agreed on real cloth rather than on a screen. Shrinkage is tested, and the pattern is adjusted for whatever residual shrinkage remains. And the roll is relaxed, laid out and left, because knitted fabric comes off the machine under tension and will shrink after cutting if it is cut while still tight.

One detail decides more colour complaints than anything else: dye lots. Two batches of the same colour dyed at different times will not match exactly. All the cloth for one run is taken from a single dye lot, and a reorder months later may not match the first run unless enough fabric was bought at the start.

Sampling and fit correction

A sample is one complete garment made from the first pattern in the real fabric, with the real trims. It is not made on the production line. One machinist makes the whole thing, because the point is to prove the garment is buildable and to see it whole.

The sample then gets fitted, on a stand or on a person, and this is where the design becomes real. Comments come back and are converted into pattern changes. That conversion matters: a note saying "sleeve feels tight" is not a change, it is a symptom. The pattern cutter has to decide whether the bicep needs 2 cm, the armhole needs to drop, or the cuff is the problem, and then alter the pattern so the change is permanent and repeatable.

Give all your changes at once. Fit correction is cheap in one round and expensive in five, because each round is a new pattern, a new cut and a new sew. Measure the sample flat, write the numbers you want instead, and photograph it on a body if you can.

When the sample is right it is approved and sealed. The sealed sample is the reference for everything after it. Bulk is checked against that garment, not against the original brief, so anything you were quietly hoping to change later needs to be changed now.

Grading is not scaling

Grading turns the approved pattern, which exists in one size, into the full size range. It is the stage beginners most consistently misunderstand, because the word sounds like resizing and it is not resizing.

If you enlarged a medium pattern by a flat percentage, every dimension would grow by the same amount. The chest would grow, but so would the neck opening, the pocket, the cuff height, the hood, the collar and the rib depth, all in proportion. The result is a garment that looks like a photocopy of itself. An XXL would have a neck hole you could put a head and a shoulder through, a pocket the size of a laptop bag, and a hood that swallows the wearer.

Real grading applies a separate increment to each measurement, distributed across specific points on the pattern. Each point has a grade rule: how far it moves horizontally and how far it moves vertically for each size step. A chest might grow 5 cm per size while the shoulder grows 1 cm, the neck grows a few millimetres, the sleeve grows 1.5 cm in length, and the body length grows 1.5 cm. Some measurements do not grow at all. A cuff height, a pocket, a hood opening, a zip pull and a collar height are usually held constant across most of the range, because a larger wearer does not have larger hands or a differently shaped head.

Grading also has to reflect how bodies actually change across a range. Larger sizes gain far more in girth than in length, so the increments are not evenly split between width and height across the whole curve. Grade rules differ by garment type, by market and by house fit, which is why the same nominal size fits differently between two brands.

Two decisions belong to the brand here. The size range, which is how many sizes you are offering, and the size curve, which is how the total quantity splits across them. A run of 100 pieces is rarely 20 of each of five sizes. Ordering a flat split is one of the more reliable ways to end a season with unsold XS and no L.

Marker making, spreading and cutting

A marker is the cutting plan. Every pattern piece, in every size being cut, arranged inside a rectangle the width of the fabric roll, positioned to waste as little cloth as possible. Nesting is the arrangement itself, fitting small pieces into the gaps left between large ones.

Marker efficiency is expressed as the percentage of the marker area covered by pattern pieces. The rest is offcut. This is a direct cost lever rather than a technicality, because fabric is usually the largest single input in a garment and efficiency decides how many metres each piece consumes. Mixing several sizes into one marker raises efficiency, because a small size's pieces fill spaces a large size's pieces cannot.

Three things constrain the nesting. Every piece must sit on the grainline, aligned to the warp of a woven or the wale of a knit, or the finished garment will twist on the body after washing. Fabrics with a nap or pile, such as brushed fleece, corduroy and velvet, must have every piece facing the same way, or panels will read as two different shades under light. And stripes, checks and one-way prints have to be matched at the seams, which forces pieces apart and costs efficiency. Choosing a check is choosing to use more cloth.

Cutting itself starts with spreading. The fabric is laid onto a long table in plies, one layer on top of another, without tension, and often left to settle before cutting. The marker goes on top, printed on paper or projected. The whole lay is then cut in one pass, by straight knife, band knife or an automated cutter following the digital marker. Notches are cut into the edges and drill marks are made through the plies for pocket positions.

Cutting is where errors stop being recoverable. A pattern mistake found here has already been multiplied by the number of plies.

Bundling and the sewing line

Cut panels do not go straight to a machinist. They are sorted by size and by ply, tied into bundles, and given a ticket that travels with them through every operation. The ticket records the style, size, colour, ply number and quantity.

The reason panels are kept in ply order is worth knowing. Shade varies very slightly along a roll and between rolls. If the front of a garment came from the top of the lay and the sleeve from the bottom, the two panels can read as different tones under strong light, which is a shading defect and a legitimate reject. Bundling by ply keeps the panels of one garment from the same part of the cloth.

Sewing is not one person making a garment. The garment is broken down into operations, each one a single task on a machine set up to do only that task. A lockstitch machine for topstitching and attaching, an overlocker for closing and neatening seams, a coverstitch for hems and cuffs and the flat twin-needle look on the outside, a bartack for stress points at pocket corners and belt loops, a buttonhole machine, a feed-off-the-arm machine for sleeve and side seams on shirts.

The operations run in an order determined by what has to be reachable. Sub-assemblies are built in parallel: the hood is joined and its eyelets set, the pocket is hemmed and shaped, the cuffs and waistband are closed, all while the body panels are being joined. On a typical hooded sweat, the pocket is attached to the front panel while it is still flat, the shoulders are joined, the sleeves are set in flat, then the side seam and underarm are closed in a single pass, the cuffs and waistband go on, the hood is attached to the neckline, the neck seam is taped, and the labels go in.

Line balancing is what keeps that moving. Each operation has a known time, and an operation that takes twice as long as the ones around it gets two operators, so work does not pile up in front of it and the operators after it are not left waiting.

Where decoration fits in the sequence

The second thing beginners get wrong is assuming decoration happens at the end. That is how print-on-demand works, because a finished blank is the only thing a decorator has. In cut and sew the decoration slots into the middle of the sequence, and where it slots in depends entirely on the method.

• All-over sublimation. Printed onto the fabric or the cut panels before the garment is assembled, with the artwork laid out to the pattern pieces and carried into the seam allowance. It cannot be done to a finished garment at all. The physics behind that is covered in our piece on what a sublimation printer is.
• Screen print, DTG, DTF and vinyl. Usually applied to the flat panel before assembly, because a flat panel gives the platen a clean bed with no seams, sleeves or zips in the way, and the print can run right to the edge of the panel. A small central chest print on a simple garment can be done after assembly.
• Puff, high-density silicone, appliqué and chenille. Flat panel, before assembly. These build height and need even pressure across the whole area.
• Embroidery. Small logos on a chest or a sleeve are hooped on the finished garment. Large backs, wrap-around placements, or anything near a seam or a pocket goes on the flat panel, because the hoop has to lie flat and cannot be clamped over a built-up seam.
• Garment dye and washes. Acid, enzyme, vintage and sunfade washes happen after the garment is fully sewn, which means they run backwards into the pattern. The garment must be cut larger to allow for the shrinkage the wash causes, and the thread, labels, zips and prints all have to survive the process.

The rule underneath all of it: anything that has to sit flat, cross a seam, or reach a place a hoop or a press bed cannot get to, happens before the garment is closed. Anything small, central and reachable can happen after.

This has a practical consequence. When decoration is done on flat panels, a rejected print costs one panel rather than one finished garment, which is cheaper. But it also means the sewing plan is written around the decoration, and adding a back print after the sewing plan is set is not a small change. Decide the method and the placement before the pattern is graded, not after.

Finishing, quality control and packing

Finishing covers everything that happens to a garment after the last structural seam. Thread ends are trimmed. Eyelets are set and drawcords threaded and tipped. Zips are checked to run. Buttons, rivets and toggles are fitted. Labels go in: a main brand label, a size label, and a care label carrying the fibre composition, which is a legal requirement for clothing sold in the UK, along with the wash symbols and the country of origin. Labels can be woven, printed satin, or a heat-transferred tagless print inside the neck. Hangtags are attached last.

Quality control is not a single inspection at the end. It runs in stages. Fabric is inspected before cutting, because a fault in the roll becomes a fault in a panel. Inline checks happen at the machines, so a badly set seam is caught in ten garments rather than in five hundred. An end-of-line check looks at each finished garment. A final audit pulls a random selection from packed cartons and measures them against the sealed sample, within an agreed tolerance at each point of measure.

The defects being looked for are specific: skipped and broken stitches, open seams, puckering, shading between panels, twisting or spirality on knits, uneven hems, misplaced or crooked prints, wrong or missing labels, loose threads.

Then pressing, which is steam or a vacuum table rather than a domestic iron, and packing. Garments are folded to an agreed fold, polybagged, and boxed either in solid sizes or in a size ratio per carton. Cartons are labelled and counted against a packing list, and the packing list is what the freight forwarder and customs work from.

What you supply and what the factory produces

The split is more lopsided than most people expect, in the brand's favour.

You supply the intent and the decisions: a reference image, a sketch or a garment you own, a description of what to change, the colourways with a colour reference if you have one, artwork at final print size, your quantity and how it splits across sizes, the wording for your labels, hangtag artwork or approval to have it made, and prompt feedback on the sample. Also a delivery address and a deposit.

The factory produces everything technical: the specification, the first pattern, the toile, the sample, the fit corrections, the graded pattern set, the marker, the sourced and tested fabric, the trims, the cut panels, the sewing plan, the decoration, the labels, the quality control, the pressing, the packing and the export paperwork.

You do not need a tech pack, a pattern, a CAD file or a factory contact in a fabric mill. Those are outputs of the process, not entry requirements for it. What you do need is to be decisive at the two moments where the process pauses for you: approving the lab dip, and approving the sample. Everything else can be delegated. Those two cannot, and our guide to finding a clothing manufacturer in the UK covers how to test whether a factory will actually stop and wait for you at those points.

How this works at NO FUGAZI

NO FUGAZI is a London-managed custom clothing manufacturer producing at its own dedicated facility. Pattern development, fit development, grading, cutting, sewing and decoration are handled in house rather than brokered out, which is the reason the sequence above can be adjusted for a specific job instead of forced through a fixed template.

You start with a reference image and a description. No tech pack, no pattern, no measurements list. We draft the technical side from what you send and come back with questions where the reference is ambiguous, which is usually about fabric weight, the fit through the body, and where the print sits.

The minimum is 50 pieces per style, and several designs around that number can often be worked out depending on how many there are and how complex they are. Sampling is not charged as a separate line when you commit to a bulk run with a deposit: the sample is made first, the deposit counts towards the bulk total, and one revision round is included. A standalone sample without a bulk commitment is charged separately.

As ranges, sampling takes about 2 to 3 weeks and bulk about 3 to 8 weeks after sample approval, plus shipping. Fabric is pre-shrunk to 1 to 3 percent residual shrinkage, quality control runs in four stages, and we ship worldwide. Decoration covers screen print, high-density silicone, puff, DTG, DTF, sublimation, vinyl, embroidery including 3D and puff, appliqué, chenille, rhinestone, laser engraving and reflective work, plus acid, vintage, enzyme and sunfade washes on fabrics that suit them.

To get a design made, send the reference, the quantity, the sizes you want and the fabric weight if you know it. WhatsApp is fastest, or use the brief form. If you are still deciding what to make first, what we make lists the garment types we build most.

Questions

How are clothes manufactured, step by step?

A brief becomes a technical spec. A pattern is drafted from an existing block and made up as a toile. Fabric is knitted or woven, dyed and shrink tested. A sample is sewn, fitted and corrected, then sealed. The pattern is graded across the sizes, nested into a cutting marker, and the fabric is spread and cut. Panels are bundled, decorated where the method requires it, sewn on a line of specialist machines, then finished, inspected, pressed and packed.

How can I get my clothing designs made?

Send a manufacturer a reference image or a garment you own, a description of what to change, your quantity and your size split. You do not need a tech pack, a pattern or print-ready files to start, because those are produced during the process. The factory drafts the spec and the pattern, makes a sample for you to approve, and only then cuts bulk. Runs at NO FUGAZI start at 50 pieces per style.

What is the difference between cut-and-sew manufacturing and print on demand?

Cut and sew builds the garment from cloth, so the fabric, the fit, the pattern, the construction and the labels are all yours to decide. Print on demand decorates a blank someone else made, so only the artwork is yours. Cut and sew is the only route to a specific fit, an unusual fabric, an all-over print that crosses seams, or a garment that does not already exist as a blank.

Do I need a tech pack to get clothes manufactured?

Not at NO FUGAZI. A reference image and a description is a normal start, and the technical side is drafted from that. A tech pack helps because it removes ambiguity and speeds up quoting, but treating it as an entry requirement stops brands who could otherwise produce. The measurements, the pattern and the specification are outputs of the sampling process rather than things you have to arrive with.

Why is grading not just resizing the pattern?

Because bodies do not scale uniformly. A flat percentage enlargement grows the neck opening, the pocket, the cuff and the hood at the same rate as the chest, which produces a garment that looks like a photocopy. Real grading gives each point on the pattern its own rule, so the chest might gain 5 cm per size while the shoulder gains 1 cm and the cuff height does not change at all.

At what stage is a garment printed or embroidered?

It depends on the method. All-over sublimation is printed on the fabric or panels before assembly and cannot be done afterwards. Screen print, DTF, puff and appliqué are usually applied to flat panels before sewing. Small chest and sleeve embroidery is hooped on the finished garment, while large or seam-adjacent embroidery goes on the panel. Garment washes happen after sewing, so the pattern is cut larger to allow for shrinkage.

Related reading

• How to start a clothing brand in the UK – what to have ready before the first factory conversation
• Streetwear fabric guide – which weight and structure gives which fit and drape
• Minimum order quantity, explained – why cut and sew runs start at 50 pieces per style
• How to find a clothing manufacturer in the UK – what to ask before you pay anyone
• How to make a tech pack, and what to do if you cannot – what goes in one, and why you do not need one to start
• Private label vs white label vs cut and sew, explained – three levels of ownership over the same garment
• How much does it cost to make a hoodie? – the cost drivers, and why a zip hoodie costs more than a pullover