How is the factory manufacture of garments different to how you would make your garment in the textiles classroom? List 3 ways.
Answers
hope it helps you
This week we took it to one of the garment factories to find out how a piece of clothing is made and what sort of work is put into making your dream design come true. With only a set of paper patterns and a couple of meters of fabric, we visited a big clothing manufacturer from Northern Europe with a goal to gain a full understanding of the process. Let us share it with you:
Without prior knowledge of how the garment manufacturing industry works it can be a bit confusing. People working with clothing factories for the first time are often frustrated with delays, long lead-times or with the lack of flexibility from the factory when a brand requests last-minute changes. You can also check out our guide on working with clothing manufacturers. Seeing the process of apparel production will help you to understand it and set your expectations right. This will allow you to build a better relationship with the clothing manufacturers. On this topic, you can check out our blog post on how to talk to clothing manufacturers when you found that right one.
Every design starts with a sketch, then a tech pack or CAD drawing. Luckily, we already completed our pre-production steps working with a lovely Designer and Tech Pack maker who sorted all this for us, helping transform an idea we had, to a very specifically looking technical drawing and a spec sheet. We then took the CADs to a Pattern Maker we knew and had patterns cut for us. We brought these to the manufacturer…
1. Patterns – Paper vs Digital
The clothing manufacturer noted straight away that for sampling and proper production our paper patterns would have to be digitised as some things are impossible to do by having only paper patterns. In the modern digital world having sewing patterns in a file rather than on paper only makes sense. The manufacturer’s pattern making specialist took our paper patterns and placed them on a large board, which is called the digitiser. It allowed the pattern maker to input the paper patterns into their own system, in our case the factory used the Assyst software. Each pattern part was paced around with a hand-held device that took a snapshot of the position of the pattern for each dot. They went all around the pattern piece until all information was collected and our pattern appeared in their software. This is a time-consuming process, as some garments have tens of panels. We were lucky as we only had a few.
2. Sorting out the patterns after digitising
The pattern maker noticed there were a couple of rough places and little imperfections which could be easily adjusted and fixed now that the pattern was in their system. Working with digital patterns allows the pattern maker to make alterations and changes with surgical precision. All measurement adjustments are visualised and tracked in real-time. By the way, the same set of patterns would be used later to grade to other sizes if we approved the produced samples. Size grading is done using the same software.
3. Lay-plan: Getting patterns ready for production
The next step was to print out the patterns on a plotter. To do so the factory specialist had to prepare a proper lay-plan, which meant laying out all pattern blocks in a specific order (in our case sampling) taking into consideration things such as fabric length, roll width, the total number of items to be produced with a breakdown of sizes. As patterns were now in their system it was quickly done. The software used for the lay-plan then suggested the optimal layout of these geometrical shapes (patterns) for the quantities we had and other criteria to make the best use of the fabric and reduce fabric consumption. Although the software did this pretty well, there still was room for improvement.