Sourcing guide
The Private Label Process, Step by Step
From first message to packed carton: what happens at each stage and which decisions block the next one.
Published
In this guide
Private label means the product carries your brand rather than the maker's. The garment is bought as a finished, labelled product, and the process from first message to packed carton is a sequence of decisions where each one gates the next.
This guide walks through the stages and, more usefully, points out which decisions hold everything else up when they are made late.
Section 1 of 4
Brief and fabric selection
The brief settles three things: what the garment is, what it is made of, and who it is for in terms of size. Fabric comes first because it constrains everything after it. A heavier compression fabric changes the waistband construction, the stitch types and the size grade, so choosing the style before the fabric often means choosing twice.
The fastest way to brief is a reference garment plus a list of what should change. A reference removes the ambiguity in the words — for example, how high a high waist is — and the change list keeps the supplier from reinterpreting parts of the garment that were already right.
Section 2 of 4
Sampling and fit rounds
One sample round is normal when the pattern already exists and only the colour or the fabric changes. A new block usually takes two, because the first sample is about the fit and the second is about the finish. Buyers who budget for one round and receive two often read the second as a delay rather than as the normal shape of development.
Feedback is where rounds are lost. Comments like 'make it fit better' restart the process, because the supplier has to guess which direction. The comments that close a round name the measurement and the direction: the waist should sit two centimetres higher, the rise at the back should be deeper, the leg should be looser below the knee.
Section 3 of 4
Approving colour and fabric
Approval is a signature against a physical standard: a piece of the actual fabric, in the actual colour, that both sides keep. This matters more than it looks. Colour varies between dye lots, and without a retained standard a repeat order has nothing to be compared against except memory and a photograph taken under unknown lighting.
The standard should be signed in the light it will be judged in, and in the lightest colour of the range if several colours are being made. Approval in one colour does not transfer to another, and it does not transfer to a different fabric.
Section 4 of 4
Production, labelling and packing
Production starts once the sample and the standards are approved. The branding is applied at the finishing stage: woven main label, printed care and composition label, hang tags if the range uses them. Labels are usually the longest lead item in the whole order, which is why the artwork needs to be ready before the fabric arrives rather than after.
Packing is where the order becomes a product. Assortments, solid colour and solid size packing, carton marks and barcodes are all decisions that are cheap to make early and expensive to change once goods are in cartons. If your warehouse scans cartons on arrival, the carton mark should be specified in the brief, not agreed at the end.
In short
Fabric first, then the pattern, then the colour standard, then the labels. The decisions that delay orders are almost never production decisions — they are approvals made after the point where they were needed.
