One Production Run, Three Markets: USA, UK and Canada
By The Velocity Wear Team
A lot of new brands sell into more than one of these three markets, often without planning to — an audience is scattered, a post travels, and orders start arriving from countries the brand had not set up for. The good news is that a single production run can serve all three. The catch is that the part which differs is the label, and labels are made during production rather than added afterwards.
Get that one decision right at artwork approval and the rest is commercial rather than structural.
What has to be on the label, market by market
- United Kingdom: fibre composition using the prescribed fibre names, on a durable, legible label attached to the garment. Care labelling is not legally required.
- United States: fibre content, the identity of the responsible company — a full business name or an FTC-issued RN — country of origin, and permanently attached care instructions, which are mandatory.
- Canada: fibre content in both English and French, plus dealer identification, either a full name and postal address or a CA identification number from the Competition Bureau. Care labelling is voluntary.
None of those conflict. The union of all three is a label carrying bilingual fibre composition, a company identity valid in each market, country of origin, and care instructions. That satisfies everywhere, and it costs essentially nothing more to produce than a minimal one.
The registrations worth doing early
An RN for the US and a CA number for Canada are both administrative rather than approvals, and both let you identify yourself on a label without printing a legal entity name and a home address into every garment. Apply before the labels are needed rather than while a production run waits.
And search the trade mark registers in all three before committing a name to a woven label. Rights are territorial — a UK registration protects you in the UK and nowhere else — and discovering a conflict after building an audience is considerably worse than discovering it in an afternoon.
Sizing: publish measurements, twice
None of the three has a governing size standard, and US conventions generally run more generous at the same letter. A size chart imported from one market and sold into another produces returns.
The fix is the same everywhere: publish flat measurements for every size — chest width, body length from the high point of the shoulder, sleeve, shoulder — in both centimetres and inches, plus model height and size worn. That transfers cleanly across all three markets where letters do not.
Tax works differently in each
UK VAT is national, with a registration threshold and a zero rate for young children's clothing that is genuinely significant if you make it. Canadian sales tax is federal plus provincial, so the rate follows the customer's province and Alberta has no provincial component. US sales tax is state by state with economic nexus thresholds, and clothing is treated specially in several states — exempt outright, or exempt below a per-item price.
You do not need to solve all three on day one. You do need your storefront configured to charge correctly by destination, and you need to be tracking where sales are going so thresholds do not arrive as a surprise.
Claims: the rules have converged
All three markets have tightened on unsubstantiated marketing. The UK's DMCC Act 2024 bans fake and undisclosed incentivised reviews. The CMA's Green Claims Code and Canada's 2024 Competition Act amendments both require environmental claims to be substantiated before publication. US origin claims are held to the FTC's "all or virtually all" standard.
The single policy that satisfies all of them: publish only what you can evidence in under a minute. Fabric weight, composition, print method, measurements, where it was made. Those are checkable, which is exactly why they persuade, and a brand built on them has nothing to maintain and nothing to withdraw.
What is genuinely shared
The garment. The fit. The artwork. The print method. The packaging, mostly — with a note that Canada carries bilingual packaging obligations and Quebec reaches further, so designing bilingually from the start is simpler than retrofitting.
That is the great majority of the product, and it means one production run genuinely does serve three markets. The divergence is concentrated in a few square centimetres of label and in how you charge tax.
Ordering for three markets at once
Test before you commit to any of them. Twenty pieces per design with mixed sizes included, worldwide tracked delivery, and invoicing in seven currencies — USD, GBP and CAD among them — means a brand can find out where the demand actually is before building fulfilment for a market that turns out to be quiet.
Then set up properly where the orders are. Production runs 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, so scaling into whichever market responded is a matter of weeks. That sequence — one run, three markets, then invest where it worked — is considerably cheaper than building three operations and finding out afterwards.
