Local vs Overseas Clothing Manufacturers
By The Velocity Wear Team
A nearby maker gives you short transit, easy visits and quick conversations, usually at a higher unit price. An overseas factory gives you lower unit costs, deeper technical capability and a longer calendar. The deciding factors are rarely the quote itself: they are how firm your deadline is, how much of the garment you want to specify, and what the order costs once it has landed in your warehouse.
How much does distance add to the calendar?
Production takes what it takes. Our own runs are 10 to 15 working days from the moment artwork is approved, wherever they are going, and transit sits on top of that. Distance changes the transit leg, not the making. What distance really changes is how expensive a mistake becomes. If a garment comes back wrong and the factory is an hour away, a correction costs days. If it is on another continent, the same correction costs a shipping cycle. That is an argument for approving a physical sample rather than for choosing a supplier by postcode.
Buyers get caught out by counting the production window and forgetting everything either side of it. Artwork approval is not the day you email a logo; it is the day you sign off the mockup. Add your own internal approvals, add transit, add a buffer for a public holiday somewhere on the route, and work backwards from the date the kit has to be in the room.
Do minimums differ between a small maker and a factory?
They do, and not always in the direction people expect. A one-person print shop near you may take ten shirts because they are decorating blanks someone else made. A factory that cuts and sews from scratch needs enough units to justify setting up a line, marking a pattern and buying fabric. Our floor is 50 pieces per design, which is deliberately low for made-to-order work, and the sizes inside those 50 are yours to arrange. Where a maker offers a genuinely tiny minimum, check what they are actually doing: decorating stock garments and manufacturing garments are different trades, and the difference is set out in the cut and sew service.
What does landed cost actually include?
The per-piece figure on a quote is the beginning of the sum, not the end. Landed cost is the unit price plus freight, plus any duty and import charges, plus the cost of the time your team spends managing the order, plus the value of whatever you have to write off if a portion arrives unusable. An overseas quote that is a third cheaper per piece can end up level once all five are counted, or it can stay well ahead — the point is to do the arithmetic rather than compare two unit prices and call it a decision. We deliver to the UK, the USA and Europe and invoice in seven currencies, and the tiers behind the per-piece figure are on the wholesale page.
How do you stop communication becoming the bottleneck?
Most offshore horror stories are communication failures wearing a costume. Fix it with documents rather than goodwill. Put the spec in writing: fabric, weight, colour reference, print or stitch positions with measurements from a fixed point, label type, packing method. Ask for photographs at pre-production rather than at dispatch. Agree who signs off what, and keep one thread rather than five. The questions that separate a supplier who will do this from one who will not are covered in questions worth asking a manufacturer, and there is a practical checklist in how to audit a clothing supplier.
Time zones are a smaller problem than they look, provided you batch your questions. One well-structured message a day beats six fragments, because each fragment costs a full cycle to answer.
