Protecting margins has always been the chief concern for apparel brands and retailers, even before the United States trade war threatened to send supply chain costs through the roof. But as conscientious as the industry is about the bottom line, fashion firms are curiously unaware of the money—and time—that’s often lost during the production process, particularly those that result from decisions made by leadership who lack the know how that comes with working in large-scale production facilities. Couple that with a top-down management structure that doesn’t allow for enough collaboration between brands and their upstream partners, and it becomes easy to imagine where the dollars and days are going.
With the White House signaling that retaliatory tariffs are here to stay on July 7, there’s new incentive to bring costs down. And manufacturing executives are eager to team up to find ways to streamline product development and construction processes, starting at the concept stage when critical choices are made that have wide-ranging ripple effects.
“The earlier that you can get manufacturing in, even at the concept stage, that can help avoid some of the problems and a lot of the inefficiencies and frustrations in that product development process,” said Margaret Bishop, a global consultant and textile engineer by training with both product development and factory experience.
That’s particularly important now, Bishop said because there’s not “a lot of people with gray hair” in management roles at fashion brands these days. As a result, “we’ve really lost a lot of that institutional knowledge and expertise” needed for a smooth production process.
Most in this crop of young leaders haven’t had the opportunity to spend time in a factory at all—beyond maybe an internship in a small workroom, which doesn’t provide the same experience, said Bishop, who’s also a professor at New York City’s leading fashion universities.
In an ideal world, she believes product development teams should spend at least three weeks in a factory setting. “Not just dictating ‘this is what we want you to do’, but really seeing how they run, what can be done, what can’t be done, what happens when you try to do something that doesn’t fit with the standard operations,” she said.
Armed with this knowledge, brand executives would be better positioned to avoid inefficiencies on the sewing line, issues with quality and protracted delivery times. Without it, downstream partners are ill-equipped to recognize how their well-meaning decisions could ultimately turn out to have unintended—and costly—consequences.
The good news is, factories are teeming with the expertise, experience and tools to optimize operations and head off any shortsighted mandates.
These teams are highly skilled in all areas of product development and garmenting and have the vast resources and relationships that come from working with multiple brands on hundreds of programs each season. In short, they are the secret weapon for those willing to lean into their expertise.
“It’s important for us, as suppliers, as partners, to be involved from the beginning,” said Diana Alvarado, design and business development director, World Textile Sourcing (WTS), an end-to-end supplier in Peru. “This helps with finding better ways of working together in order to get more competitive prices, and also to save time, in terms of speed to market.”
Below, production executives highlight just a few of the biggest margin killers, calendar busters and sustainability drags they can help their clients avoid.
1. Ordering custom colors
Color is a major design element in seasonal collections—and it can be a major opportunity for brands and retailers looking to recoup lost time and money.
“I feel a lot of input from the manufacturer would actually help buyers to do better, but sometimes they come with very fixed mindsets.”
—Alexander Neroth, NC John Garments
Elevate Textiles offers tens of thousands of color options across its A&E and Guttermann thread businesses. But despite the vast library, clients often request a custom hue. Whether it is to make their collections stand out on the racks or simply to match fabric that’s already been produced, that single choice affects more than most realize.
“That color development work takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of money. And it represents a lot of chemical and water use of doing samples and doing the development work, and then shipping samples back and forth,” explained Jimmy Summers, Vice President of Environment, Health, Safety & Sustainability and Chief Sustainability Officer for Elevate Textiles.
Ultimately, custom colors add up to two to three weeks of development time—and that’s when everything goes to plan. Similarly, Summers said the cost is “significant.”
The consequences are multiplied when batch sizes are small, which they often are these days.
2. Buying in small batches
Driven by a desire to hedge commitments and avoid overstocks, the fashion industry has moved toward smaller, more frequent orders. Theoretically, this strategy results in fewer markdowns and better margins. But the math might not actually work in the brand’s favor when taking production impacts into account.
“The small lot sizes are extremely inefficient,” Summers said. “From a resource standpoint, it is the opposite direction we need to be going.”
While Alvarado acknowledges the need for test runs, full production orders portioned out in small batches, reordered time and again mean brands are losing out on economies of scale savings. “If you put these orders together, you get a more competitive price,” she said.
Alvarado said the best savings come when brands share sales numbers they and their production partners can then use to make projections. “With that information, we can leverage our yarns, our fibers, our fabrics, and, of course, the whole factory efficiency,” she said.
Ultimately, it comes down to forecasting. The better the forecast, the more confident brands can be that they won’t get stuck with misaligned stock.
Summers said that’s one advantage fast fashion retailers like Shein have over everyone else. “They are very good at minimizing inventory and really just producing to demand.”
3. Focusing on single costs
While being granular and looking at every aspect of product development seems like the best practices for whittling down costs and timelines, those details are only beneficial when viewed in context.
For instance, Alvarado said she frequently gets requests for fabric costs ahead of final costs. But for a vertical manufacturer like WTS, making merchandising decisions based on one isolated line item doesn’t tell the whole story.
“It’s a matter of looking at the whole picture, not only the initial cost, because we can achieve the right cost at the end,” Alvarado said, explaining there are many levers to pull along the way. “We take care of everything from raw martials to delivery so this means that just looking at the fabric cost actually doesn’t mean much.”
Despite this, some partners will drop a program because they’re scared off by how expensive their fabric of choice is. Instead, she encourages clients to work with the WTS team to find creative ways to achieve their goals. For instance, if 100 percent Pima cotton is too expensive, Alvarado said she can often find a different yarn count with a special finish that mimics the hand and quality of the more expensive option.
Alternatively, there are also strategies for hitting the target price while sticking with the more desirable fabrication.
“There’s also a way to optimize cost by changing the construction of the garment, and also the fabric consumption,” Alvarado said, adding her team is expert at tweaking construction without compromising the designer’s vision. For instance, a fabric-hungry tunic could become more manageable with the addition of a center seam. “We have software programs [that allow us] to look at fabric consumption from the pattern perspective.”
Rather than allowing his team to help in these scenarios, too often Alexander Neroth, director of production facility NC John Garments in India, said customers will do themselves the disservice of problem solving on their own. The result could be swapping in a 200 GSM weight fabric for a 210 GSM to save fabric costs without realizing how the fabric will shrink or elongate during the washing or production process.
“I feel a lot of input from the manufacturer would actually help buyers to do better, but sometimes they come with very fixed mindsets,” he said.
4. Clinging to analog processes
While Neroth’s team can advise customers on a range of best practices, their biggest tip is: employ digital design tools.
“Moving programs around and looking for other suppliers is not a way of saving costs.”
—Diana Alvarado, World Textile Sourcing (WTS)
Neroth said at this point digital prototyping tools are “perfect.”
NC John Garments has slashed lead times by upwards of two to three weeks for a single style using Clo3D to replace physical fit sample rounds. The company uses it to grade sizes and prints and identify potential fit issues, resulting in a spot-on final physical sample.
Despite this demonstrable savings, Neroth said many clients are hesitant to adopt the technology. Meanwhile, those who have are reaping the rewards. “One or two of the customers, especially large retail chains, have looked at it and found that they save a lot of money just in couriers,” Neroth said, referring to the delivery of multiple rounds of fit samples needed for analog product development. “It has a direct impact on price.”
And, he said, cutting down on materials and shipping in this way is better for the environment as well.
5. Micromanaging sustainability
Increasingly, brands and retailers are factoring the planet into their production plans. In theory that’s a good thing. In practice, each company’s disparate goals and policies can become roadblocks to progress.
As a large supplier, Elevate Textiles has developed its own science-based targets and sustainability goals. The problem is each of its customers has different stakeholders, risk assessments, legal advice and media exposure that inform their individual strategies. The result is top-down mandates that threaten to derail Elevate Textiles’ own plans.
“What we’re proposing to spend our very limited, very precious capital on are the things that get the biggest bang for the buck for us,” Summers said. “But we’ve had customers tell us, ‘We don’t care. This is what’s important to us so, if you want to supply us, this is what you’ve got to do.’”
Faced with these stipulations, the company must comply, despite knowing it’s not the ideal path. “It doesn’t create a situation where we can make progress really quickly, and it also causes misallocation of capital. And it creates crazy bandwidth problems to even deal with all these different requests and requirements,” Summers said.
The result is a “significant” hit to costs.
Summers hopes the incoming environmental regulations will ultimately streamline processes but for now, he says, “We’re in the very wild early parts of it.”
6. Relying on transactional relationships
The wild days of sustainability regulation is now colliding with a turbulent tariff era. Subsequently, some fashion firms are actively investigating new production countries to lessen the duty blow. But with trade uncertainty high, today’s safe harbor could be ground zero for a future tariff bombshell. Ultimately, that means diversification too might have its drawbacks.
By spreading orders too thin, companies lose the financial benefits inherent in long-held relationships, Alvarado said. “Moving programs around and looking for other suppliers is not a way of saving costs.”
Plus, you never know what could come next—and how close collaboration with a strategic partner might be just the thing to alleviate an otherwise disastrous situation.
“Everything’s great when all’s going well. It’s when there’s a problem that you really need that relationship,” Bishop said, pointing to the current need to get goods in ahead of the tariff deadline as an example. “When you have treated those factories well and really treated them as long-term partners, they’re going to stand up for you and do what they can to help you.”
