# Tracing a garment from sketch to sales floor
A designer sketches a floral midi dress in a New York studio in January. That dress will not hang on a sales floor until roughly September, and by the time it does, most of its financial fate has already been decided. The margin was locked in during sourcing. The markdown risk was baked in during forecasting. The customer just gets to confirm or deny it.
Let's follow one dress through the pipelinepipelineAll active sales opportunities across the stages of the sales process, together with their combined potential value and probability of closing.Voir la définition complète → and see where the money is actually made and lost.
The sketch is the easy part. The document that matters is the tech pack (technical package): a detailed spec sheet that tells a factory exactly how to build the garment.
A tech pack includes:
If the tech pack is vague, the factory guesses, and guesses cost money in sampling rounds and delays. A clean tech pack is the difference between two sample rounds and six.
Want to see what one actually contains? Techpacker publishes a solid free tech pack guide that shows real examples.
The factory produces a proto sample (first physical version), then a fit sample, then a pre-production (PP) sample that is the approved gold standard. Each round is mailed internationally and takes one to three weeks.
Meanwhile, the brand negotiates FOB cost (Free On Board): the price the brand pays for the finished garment loaded onto a ship at the origin port. FOB rolls up fabric, trims, labor, factory overhead, and factory margin.
Here is a simplified, illustrative cost stack for our dress (figures are indicative, not a quote):
| Component | Approx. share of FOB |
|---|---|
| Fabric | 50 to 65% |
| Labor | 15 to 25% |
| Trims | 5 to 10% |
| Factory overhead and profit | 10 to 20% |
Notice: fabric usually dominates. This is why designers who add a full lining or an extra half meter of a printed cotton can quietly wreck a margin. Cutting one button changes little. Cutting fabric consumption changes everything.
Our dress could be made in several countries. The two most cited apparel exporters after China are Bangladesh and Vietnam, and they are not interchangeable.
Bangladesh is strong on high-volume basics and knits, with very competitive labor rates. Since the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse, the country has invested heavily in factory safety; it now hosts a large number of LEED-certified green factories (an environmental building standard). Trade-off: longer inland logistics and a heavier reliance on imported fabric.
Vietnam tends to command a modest premium but offers faster turns, strong wovens, and deeper synthetic and technical fabric capability. It also benefits from trade agreements such as the CPTPP and the EU-Vietnam FTA (free trade agreements that lower tariffs for member markets).
The sourcing choice is a bet on three variables:
1. Landed cost (total cost to get the goods to your warehouse, including duty and freight)
2. Speed
3. Compliance and reputation risk
A brand chasing the lowest FOB may pay it back in slower lead times and higher markdown risk. That trade-off is the whole game.
Once the PP sample is approved and the purchase order (PO) is placed, the clock starts:
Total factory lead time commonly runs 90 to 120 days from PO to goods ready. This is why brands commit to fabric and quantities months before they know if the trend will hold. That gap between commitment and demand signal is the origin of most markdown pain.
The finished dresses are packed into a shipping container and moved by ocean freight, the default mode for apparel because air freight costs many times more.
From South or Southeast Asia to the US West Coast, ocean transit typically runs three to five weeks, plus port handling and inland trucking or rail. Add customs clearance and it is comfortably four to six weeks door to door in a normal environment.
Two things brands watch obsessively:
Air freight exists as an emergency lever. Brands use it to rescue a hot seller or a late launch, accepting the cost hit to protect full-price sales.
The container arrives at a port, gets trucked to a distribution center (DC), and here the goods split two ways:
The DC handles receiving, quality checks, ticketing, and allocation. Allocation is a quiet high-stakes decision: which stores and channels get how many units. Send too many midi dresses to a cold-weather region and you create markdown before a single customer walks in.
Now the dress is finally for sale, and we can see the full economics.
The initial markup (IMU) is the gap between cost and the first ticketed retail price. But IMU is fiction until the goods actually sell at that price. What matters is maintained margin: the margin after markdowns, promotions, and shrink.
Markdown risk lives in three places, and none of them is the store:
1. The forecast. Quantities were committed 6-plus months earlier. Over-buy a trend and you guaranteed a markdown.
2. The lead time. Long pipelines mean you cannot react fast when the read is wrong. Slow supply chains convert small forecast errors into large clearance piles.
3. The allocation. Right total quantity, wrong stores, still equals markdowns.
This is why speed-to-market models (see the fast-fashion playbook: smaller initial buys, faster replenishment) exist. Shorter lead times let a brand chase winners and cut losers before the markdown clock runs out. You trade some FOB cost for far less markdown exposure.
Vérification des acquis
1. The lesson emphasizes that 'most of a garment's financial fate has already been decided' before it reaches the sales floor. What is the core concept this illustrates?
2. Why does a vague tech pack cost a brand money?
3. A brand agrees to an FOB cost for a dress. What does that figure represent?
4. Select ALL correct answers. Which items would legitimately belong inside a garment's tech pack?
Sélectionnez toutes les réponses correctes.
5. Select ALL correct answers. Which statements accurately describe the sampling process described in the lesson?
Sélectionnez toutes les réponses correctes.
For our floral midi dress, a realistic full timeline:
Roughly eight to nine months, with the profit-determining decisions clustered in the first four. By the time a customer sees the dress, the brand is largely a spectator on its own margin.
Whether you sit in merchandising, finance, marketing, or operations, the lesson is the same: the sales floor reveals results, it does not create them. A sharp promotional campaign cannot fix an over-buy. A great store display cannot shorten a 120-day lead time.
The levers that move maintained margin are upstream: tighter tech packs, smarter sourcing trade-offs, disciplined forecasting, and lead times short enough to react.