Checking Your First Delivery Properly
By The Velocity Wear Team
A production run arrives, it looks right, and it goes into the cupboard. Two months later a customer emails to say the print on theirs is off-centre, and you discover that a portion of the run has the same issue — long after the point where anything could have been done about it. Fifteen minutes on arrival prevents that entirely.
How many to check
On a 20-piece run, check all of them. It takes minutes and there is no statistical sampling argument at that quantity.
On a few hundred, check a meaningful sample — a proportion from different cartons rather than the top layer of one, and covering every size and every colourway. Defects are not distributed evenly, so a sample from one carton tells you about one carton.
The checklist
- 1Count. The right number, in the right sizes. Reconcile against the packing list and against your order, which are not always the same document.
- 2Measure. Chest width and body length on at least three sizes, against the specification and against your retained sample. This is where grading errors show up.
- 3Print placement. Measured, not eyeballed — width, distance from the high point of the shoulder, offset from centre.
- 4Colour. Against your Pantone reference and against your retained sample from the previous run, in daylight.
- 5Print quality. Look for cracking, pinholes, underbase showing at the edges, and misregistration on multi-colour designs.
- 6Labels. Correct content, correct languages, sewn straight, legible.
- 7Construction. Seams, rib recovery, loose threads, and anything that looks rushed.
Wash one
Take one garment out of the run and put it through a full wash and dry cycle, then look at it again. Colour, print integrity, shrinkage, rib recovery, label legibility.
Sacrificing one garment from every run is a small cost and it catches the class of problem that only appears after laundering — which is also the class of problem that generates the angriest customer emails, because the customer has already worn it.
Keep a retained sample
Set one garment aside from every run, unworn and unwashed, labelled with the date and the order. That is your physical reference for the next production run, and it is worth far more than a photograph.
Colour in particular cannot be assessed from an image. When a repeat run arrives in six months and something feels slightly different, a retained garment turns that feeling into a comparison you can actually make.
If something is wrong
Raise it immediately and specifically. "The print is too high" is an opinion; "the print measures 14cm from the high point of the shoulder against a specified 18cm, on 12 of the 20 pieces" is a fact that can be acted on.
Photograph it, with a tape measure in the shot. Quantify how many units are affected. And raise it before you start selling the run, because a partially sold run is much harder to resolve than an intact one.
Write it down each time
Keep a short record per delivery: date, quantities, the measurements you took, anything noted. It takes two minutes and it turns individual impressions into a trend you can see.
A single garment measuring 1cm out is noise. The same measurement drifting the same direction across three runs is information, and it is only visible if somebody wrote the numbers down.
