The Tech Pack: What a First-Time Brand Actually Needs to Write
By The Velocity Wear Team
Tech pack is an intimidating phrase for a simple idea: the specification, written down, so that nobody has to guess. Full industry tech packs for cut-and-sew development run to many pages of construction detail. A brand printing its own artwork on an established blank needs a fraction of that, and the fraction it needs is the part that actually decides what arrives.
Why write anything at all
Because every unwritten detail is a decision somebody else makes. Print size, exact placement, ink type, label content, size split — each gets decided by whoever is doing the work, using their best judgment, which is not the same as your intention.
It also gives you something to check the delivery against. Without a written specification, "this is not what I expected" is an opinion; with one, it is a comparison.
What a first tech pack needs
- 1The garment: style, fabric composition, weight in GSM, colour as a Pantone reference, and the fit if it is not the blank's standard.
- 2The size range and the quantity per size. Not just the range — the actual numbers.
- 3Each decoration: which artwork file, which method, which placement, at what width, measured from the high point of the shoulder, centred or offset by a stated amount.
- 4Colours in the artwork, as Pantone references, with a note on which is the underbase if you know.
- 5Label content: fibre composition, care instructions, country of origin, company identity — in whichever languages your markets require.
- 6Packing: how garments should be folded, bagged, and cartoned, plus anything a fulfilment partner requires such as barcodes or per-size separation.
- 7The date you need it in hand.
What you can leave out
If you are printing on an established blank, you do not need to specify seam types, stitch densities, interlinings or a full points-of-measure table — those are properties of the garment you have chosen and they are already fixed.
What you should do instead is ask for the blank's measurement table across every size, so you can publish it and check the delivery against it. That is the useful half of a points-of-measure document without you having to write one.
Include a picture, but not only a picture
A mockup is genuinely useful — it communicates intent quickly and it catches gross misunderstandings. It just cannot carry measurements, so treat it as an illustration accompanying the numbers rather than a substitute for them.
The same applies to reference images. "Like this brand's fit" is useful context and a terrible specification, because it asks someone to interpret an adjective. Say what you like about it and then give the measurements.
Version it
Put a date and a version number on the document, and update it rather than sending a new file with a slightly different name. Production going ahead against version 2 while you are looking at version 4 is a real failure mode and it produces a delivery nobody expected.
One document, dated, that is the single source of truth. When something changes, change it there.
It becomes your reorder file
The tech pack's real value arrives on the second order. Six months later, nobody remembers the exact print width or which Pantone the green was — but the document does, and a reorder against a written specification comes back matching the run your customers already own.
That consistency is a large part of what makes a series of production runs feel like a brand. Update the specification after the first delivery with what you actually measured, and it gets more accurate every cycle.
