How to Audit a Clothing Supplier
By The Velocity Wear Team
Auditing a clothing supplier comes down to four things you can do from a desk: order a physical sample, ask questions whose answers are checkable, look at how the quote is itemised, and see whether the payment terms put any risk on the supplier at all. A factory visit is useful if you can manage one. Most buyers cannot, and the four checks catch most of what a visit would.
What does a sample really tell you about a supplier?
More about the supplier than about the garment. Read it as a test of process. Did the mockup you approved match what arrived? Did the colour land where the reference said it would? Is the stitching even at the hems and the cuffs, not just across the chest where the logo is? Were you told the date it would ship, and did it ship then? A supplier who is careless with a sample they know is being judged will not become careful in bulk. A sample is £150 here and the amount comes off the bulk order, so the check pays for itself for anyone who proceeds — and there is more on what it can and cannot prove in why a sample comes before bulk.
Which questions get past the sales answer?
Specific ones, with numbers in them. "Do you do quality control" gets a yes from everybody. "Who checks the garments, at what stage, and what happens to a piece that fails" gets a real answer or an evasion, and both are informative. A few more worth asking: which decoration methods are done in house rather than subcontracted; what the production window is from artwork approval; what happens if a size runs short; whether you can be sent photographs before dispatch. A longer list sits in questions worth asking a manufacturer.
Pay attention to what a supplier volunteers without being asked. Being told that a fabric behaves badly in a particular colour, or that a deadline is tight, is a better sign than smooth agreement with everything you propose. You can read what we do in house and where we ship on the about page.
What should the quote and the terms look like?
A quote should be itemised enough that you can see what changes if you change something. Garment, decoration by position, any labelling or packaging, the quantity tier it is priced at, and shipping as a separate line. A single number with no breakdown makes it impossible to negotiate sensibly and impossible to spot what was left out. The tier structure behind the per-piece price is published, and the range it applies to is on the wholesale page.
On terms, the thing to look for is whether the supplier carries any exposure. A deposit against production is normal and reasonable — fabric has to be bought. Demanding the full amount before anything is made, with no sample stage and no approval point, is not. Equally, be wary of terms that seem too relaxed: a supplier taking no deposit on a made-to-order run is either very confident or not actually making anything to order.
How do you check they can repeat the job?
Because the second order is where most relationships fail. Ask what they retain after a run: the approved artwork files, the colour reference, the thread and ink numbers, the size specification. A supplier who keeps a record can match a reorder months later. One who asks you to resend everything each time will produce a slightly different garment each time, and the drift compounds across three or four runs until the old stock and the new stock no longer look like the same product.
Ask about capacity honestly too. Not "can you handle a big order" but "what does 2,000 pieces do to your lead time". Ours is 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, with transit on top, and a supplier who cannot tell you how their window moves with volume has not thought about it.
