From the receiving end
The garment tech pack, read from the factory side
Almost everything written about tech packs is written by somebody who sells templates. We read them. A pack arrives, someone has to cut cloth from it, and the distance between what the document says and what a pattern needs is where a season gets lost. So this is the other half of that exchange: what gets read first, what gets skipped, and the handful of lines that decide whether the first sample comes back close enough to sell. The short version is that a tech pack for tailored clothing is not a t-shirt tech pack with a jacket drawn on it. A jersey pack is mostly a bill of materials and a print placement. A jacket is mostly geometry and cloth, and both of those have to be settled before anyone can quote you, let alone cut.
What each garment needs before anyone can cut
| Jersey and knitwear | Woven shirt | Tailored jacket and trousers | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What decides the fit | Body measurements plus how much the knit gives back. Two centimetres of stretch forgives a lot of imprecision. | A points-of-measure list and a collar spec. Less forgiving than jersey, more forgiving than a jacket. | Geometry. Chest, shoulder, and the balance between front and back length. Woven cloth gives nothing back. |
| What has to be locked first | Fabric weight, then print or embroidery placement. | Collar and cuff shape, then the fabric. | The cloth, before anything else. Weight and weave change the pattern, so a jacket cannot be specified cloth-blind. |
| Where the errors surface | In the wash. Shrinkage was not accounted for. | At the collar and the cuff, because that is where the eye goes. | At the shoulder and in the back balance, and both of those mean a new garment rather than an alteration. |
| What a downloadable template covers | Most of what you need. These templates were built for jersey. | Roughly half. Collar and placket detail is usually missing. | Very little. The fields that decide a tailored garment are not on it. |
| What we ask for when the pack is thin | A reference garment. | A reference garment, and the collar you want copied. | A reference garment you already own and wear, measured flat. It outperforms any document. |
None of this is a judgement on document quality. A one-page pack carrying the right four decisions moves faster here than a forty-page pack that never names the cloth.
The vocabulary, defined the way a factory uses it
Same words, different weight depending on which side of the order you sit.
- Tech pack
- The document a brand sends a manufacturer to describe a garment: measurements, materials, construction, labelling. There is no standard format, which is why two packs describing the same jacket can look nothing alike and why the first thing anyone does on receipt is hunt for the measurements.
- Points of measure
- The list of places a garment is measured and the value each one should hit. Abbreviated POM. This is the section that gets read first and, on most packs that arrive here, the section that is thinnest.
- Tolerance
- How far a finished garment may sit from the stated value at a given point and still pass. Without a stated tolerance, every deviation is either acceptable or a defect depending entirely on who is arguing, which is a bad position for the brand to be in.
- Bill of materials
- Every component in the garment: cloth, lining, canvas, interlining, buttons, thread, labels. Abbreviated BOM. For tailored clothing most of it stays undecidable until the cloth is chosen, because the canvas and the lining follow from the cloth rather than the other way round.
- Grading
- How each measurement changes from one size to the next. A pack carrying a single size describes one garment, not a range, and turning it into a range is a separate piece of work that has to happen before production.
- Base size
- The size the pattern is drafted at and graded out from. Naming it is a one-line decision that prevents an entire class of confusion later, and it is missing from most packs.
- Callout
- An annotated close-up of one detail: a pocket mouth, a buttonhole, a vent, a cuff. Worth more than a paragraph describing the same thing, and much harder to misread across a language boundary.
- Reference garment
- An existing garment sent in to be measured and matched. This is not a fallback for a bad pack. It is frequently the most useful object in the box, because it settles in an afternoon what a document spends four emails failing to settle.
Questions we get asked before the first pack arrives
What is a tech pack?
It is the specification a brand sends a manufacturer so that a garment can be made without the two parties being in the same room. At minimum it carries measurements with tolerances, a materials list, construction notes, and labelling. There is no industry standard for the format, so the useful test is not whether it looks professional but whether a pattern cutter who has never spoken to you could work from it alone.
Do I need a tech pack to get a quote?
For made-to-measure, no. Made-to-measure works from a fit block and a set of options rather than from a pattern you own, so what we need is the cloth, the construction, the options, and the measurements per customer. A tech pack becomes necessary when you want your own pattern, your own block, or a garment that differs from the option set. If you are not sure which of those you are asking for, say so in the first email and it costs nothing to sort out.
Can I use a free tech pack template?
For a t-shirt or a hoodie, yes, and most of the free templates are honestly fine for that. For tailored clothing, no, and we would rather you did not. The templates in circulation are built around jersey: they have generous room for print placement and stitch type, and almost nothing for the fields that decide a jacket. A blank page with chest, shoulder, sleeve, front length, back length, the cloth, and the canvas type written on it is a better document than a template that never asks for any of them.
Can you work from a 3D render or a CLO file?
We will look at one and it is genuinely useful for agreeing what a garment should look like. We will not cut from it. A render shows intent, not geometry, and the simulation settings that make a jacket hang correctly on screen do not correspond to the way a specific cloth at a specific weight behaves on a body. Send the render by all means, then send the numbers as well.
How detailed does the measurement section need to be?
Detailed enough that nothing is left to interpretation. Our own system carries 47 measurement fields across jacket, trousers, waistcoat, and shirt, of which 31 are required, and that number exists because each of the optional ones turned out to matter on some body and not on others. You do not have to match that. You do have to give a number wherever you would otherwise write an adjective. If your pack says slim fit, we cannot make it, and we will come back and ask what slim means in centimetres.
What happens if the pack is wrong?
The sample comes back wrong, and it is the brand that carries it: you paid for a sample you cannot sell, and the second attempt costs you the calendar. Our own turnaround runs 14 to 20 working days, so a specification error is rarely a single delay, it is a delay plus a review plus another run. This is the argument for a reference garment and for stating tolerances. Both of them convert an argument into a measurement.
Who owns the pack and the pattern?
Whatever you agreed in writing, which is why it should be in writing. Ask any supplier, ourselves included, to state plainly who owns the tech pack, who owns the pattern developed from it, and what happens to both if you stop working together. A supplier who will not put that in a sentence has told you something useful.
Do I still need a pack if I am ordering from your option set?
No. There are 347 style options in the system covering lapel, vent, pocket, lining, button stance, and the rest, and if the garment you want is expressible in those, the option selection is the specification. A pack starts earning its keep at the point where you want something the option list does not contain.
Send the four decisions, not the forty pages
Cloth, construction, base size, and a reference garment. With those four we can tell you whether what you want is a made-to-measure order or a pattern development project, and those are very different pieces of work.