Start a conversation

Shenzhen

Apparel in China: the fabric decides everything before the factory does

Garment buyers choose a maker and then discover the material controls the price, the lead time and the minimum. Reversing that order is most of the job.

China → France

Apparel sourcing looks like choosing a factory. It is not. The garment factory is the last and most replaceable link. What sets your cost, your minimum quantity and your calendar is the fabric — its composition, its dyeing, its availability — and that decision sits upstream of anyone who will sew for you.

Why your minimum is really a fabric minimum

A factory quoting a minimum of several hundred pieces per colour is usually not describing its sewing capacity. It is passing on the mill's minimum dye lot. Dyeing a colour has a floor quantity, and below it the mill either refuses or charges a surcharge that destroys your margin.

This is why the single most effective lever for a small apparel brand is to reduce colours, not to negotiate the factory price. Three colourways instead of six can halve your committed quantity without touching your range.

The alternative is stock fabric — material the mill already holds. Cheaper, available immediately, no dye minimum, and you take the colour that exists rather than the one on your mood board. For a first collection this trade is almost always worth making.

The sample sequence, which nobody shortens successfully

  1. Fit sample — the pattern, in any available fabric. You are judging construction and proportion, not material.
  2. Fabric and colour approval — a physical swatch, approved under the light you will sell in. Screens lie about colour, always.
  3. Pre-production sample — correct fabric, correct trims, correct labels. This is the one that becomes the reference.
  4. Size set — one of each size, because grading errors only appear at the extremes and only after production if you skip this.

What European buyers will ask you for

Fibre composition and country of origin on the label, in the languages of the markets you sell in, and increasingly an answer on the factory's social compliance audit. A serious buyer will ask which mill dyed the fabric, not only which factory sewed the garment. Being able to answer that is a commercial advantage; being unable to is becoming a disqualification.

Textile capacity is concentrated in the Yangtze delta far more than in the south. If your sourcing contact only works in Guangdong, you are seeing a fraction of the market — and usually the trading fraction rather than the mills.

Questions we get on this.

Why is the minimum quantity per colour and not per style?

Because it comes from the dye lot, not from the sewing line. Reducing the number of colourways lowers your committed quantity far more effectively than negotiating the making price.

Keep reading on this.

ShenzhenSourcing north: Ningbo, Suzhou, Hangzhou and the other manufacturing ChinaThe Pearl River Delta is not the whole country. For textiles, chemicals, machinery and precision engineering, the Yangtze delta is often the better answer — and it works differently.China sourcingSamples: how many rounds, and what the last one is forThe sample loop is where the project's time is really spent. Its purpose is not approval — it is producing a physical reference both sides are bound by.China sourcingMOQ is a negotiation, not a lawA minimum order quantity comes from one of three places. Two of them are physics. The third moves as soon as the relationship does.ShenzhenWhen your supplier goes under: what you can still get out, and in what orderTooling you paid for, a deposit already wired, stock half finished. The outcome depends almost entirely on decisions you took before there was a problem.

If this raised a question about your own project, tell us where you are — the first conversation usually clarifies more than a proposal.

Talk about your product →Read the full guide