What is a Tech Pack?

 After you have developed your fashion brand and researched the market, now it's time to bring those ideas to life. You begin your search for clothing producers and ask about their prices. You are enthusiastic to move forward but... the tech pack stops you in your tracks.

Now is the time to be afraid: tech packs are now a thing of the past. Without a tech pack, clothing manufacturers will not talk to you and won't provide production quotes.

This is the point where you decide to not stop. You look up Google for help with determination and hope. While you've read pages upon pages of information and spent hours online researching, you still feel far from being able to understand the technology packs.

If this sounds familiar, please continue reading.

This article will answer all your questions about tech packages for fashion brand owners.

The tech pack's purpose is to describe to your sewing machine, using visual guides, what you would expect to see at end of production line.

Yes, I get that. But why is it that sewing factories are unable to provide me with a production quote without a technical pack?

Clothing manufacturers calculate the production time for each garment based upon the instructions that fashion designers give in their tech packets. Your tech pack should contain all the information required to allow a clothing manufacturer such an estimate.

A traditional tech pack should include:

1. technical sketches
2. garment specifications
3. raw material allocations 

This allows fashion designers to set standards, and clothing producers to gauge designer expectations.

What should a Tech Pack look like?

There is currently no universal format. This is a good thing. It allows us flexibility to adapt to the production conditions and budget. However, fashion designers who are not experienced in this field may find it confusing. The Fashion Designer Toolkit offers a sample tech pack and a standard template for industry tech packs.

What information should fashion designer include in their tech kits?

Annotations and a clear illustration of your garment can sometimes be enough, especially when you are working with sample makers or cutters during a pattern cutting/sampling stage. A tech pack is required to accompany your garment manufacturing. This will require greater detail.

These are the most important pages in any complete production tech kit.

You can also include optional pages depending on your style. These pages can be:

The packing and Labelling Manual, which will include instructions on how to package your clothing manufacturer.

The garment can be made in different colour variants.

1. You can tell your clothing manufacturer where to position embellishments and print them.
2. Markers and layouts are helpful for garments with print placement as well as stock control.
3. A cutting sheet is a list of all the pattern pieces with cutting information.
4. We hope that now you are more familiar with tech packs and the contents they should contain. However, you might have many more questions than you thought when you started. 
5. So, we've created another blog post to help you with your questions. You can continue reading at this link.

You can also choose to take the initiative and help your business succeed. We have created the Fashion Designer Toolkit, which has been helpful to many start-up fashion brands, and helped them navigate the manufacturing process.