Blue is the New black. Susie Breuer
for approval. Once approved, the mill will weave up the fabric and send it to the garment factory.
GREIGE
Greige fabric is un-dyed, unfinished fabric, and is often ordered by brands when they are not yet in a position to select colours. They need to secure the fabric whilst the proto is being made in an available colour, but perhaps prefer to wait until the proto review to finalise shades. If they were to wait until the 1st garment review to book the fabric they might be too late. This is when greige is booked. Once the greige is booked, it undergoes a finishing process which makes it ‘ready to dye’ which makes it ready for either use in piece dye or garment dye.
GARMENT DYE
Garment dyeing is a method of fabric dyeing after it has been made into a garment. If a brand wants to have a garment that looks used or vintage, it will make the garment in a ready to dye fabric and submerge it in a vat of dye complete with its buttons, labels and thread. The whole garment comes out coloured if a little uneven in its shading. Brands, such as Pepe Jeans, and Abercrombie and Fitch, use garment dyes for some of their designs.
SELECTING FABRICS
If I’m selecting fabric for a designer or for a collection, I would make my research on the styles of garments the collection has, the price indications for the styles, and the ideas from the designer on the fabric types. I would draw up a short list of fabric mills and would make appointments to look at their collections to make selections against my list of requirements. From these selections I would order header cards.
SEASONAL CONSIDERATIONS
One point to make here is that depending on your final market (customer) you may need to have a good selection of all types and weights of fabrics. If you are based in Europe, but also sell to stores in Australia, you will need to incorporate a broader selection of fabric weights to accommodate the opposite seasons or climate. If it is a Spring range, the fabric weights will be lightweight, while in a Fall season the weights will be heavier (of course it is a little more complicated than that, but for the sake of simplicity let’s keep it as this).
HEADER CARDS
This is a square of fabric (that can be up to 30cm x 30cm) with its technical details written on the top for reference. This will include the reference code for the fabric, the price, the colour reference number, the weight per m2, the width and composition (100% wool, or 70% wool 30% cashmere, etc.). The designer orders headers like this from various mills to review them around 2 weeks later.
REVIEWING THE FABRICS
The review of the fabrics goes in three stages:
> According to fabric type
Once I had received all the header cards from the mills I would split them up into fabric types, e.g. wool, silk, cotton, so that I had a clear spread of qualities.
> According to construction and weight
From here I would subdivide the piles of header cards further into weave and weight, so all the satins, twills, bouclés, poplins, drills, denims, meltons, crepes and canvas were separate; this way I would have clearer comparison in order to make a better decision.
> According to price
Finally, I would make a note of the price on top of each of the header cards; this is a very important factor in the decision making process, as the fabric price accounts for a high percentage of the cost price of the garment and has a major influence on the profit margin of the style.
MINIMUM ORDER CONSIDERATIONS
Every fabric mill has ‘minimum order’ quantities that it attaches to fabrics for sampling and also for production. The reason why minimums are set is as follows: to set up the machines to weave 1 m of the fabric is the same amount of effort as for 50 m, but there is more profit in 50 m than in 1 m. So, with this in mind the mill sets minimums accordingly. Sampling fabric is the term used for the quantity of fabric ordered for prototypes or salesman (selling samples). The minimums set by the fabric mills can either be per colour or per fabric article (this is an important fact to check at the fabric selection stage).
PER COLOUR
Fabric minimums per colour means you have to sell a lot of garments in one particular colour to meet fabric minimums, which is ok if the fabric is white, black or navy, but not so easy if it is yellow, pink or green. For instance, a men’s shirt is made in green cotton poplin. The production minimums for this fabric are 500 m per colour. This means that you have to sell around 250 pieces of that shirt to meet the minimum order quantity. Depending on the shade of green, this could be easy or hard to achieve. It would be better if the minimums were around 100 m per colour, so that the brand would only have to sell around 50 pieces of the shirt to meet the minimums. A fabric with minimums of 500 m of a colour would not be a great choice in this example.
PER FABRIC ARTICLE
Fabric minimums per fabric article is much easier to work with for a brand, and this requirement means that it could be possible to have several colours of a fabric at lower quantities each and still be able to meet minimums. For instance, a wool bouclé fabric has production minimums of 1000 m per fabric. The fabric will be used for a jacket in four colours, which will equate to around 100 pieces of each jacket in each colour to reach the minimum. This is a great result, and it would be a great fabric for the developer to select and show the designer.
For sampling, where a small amount of fabric is needed for prototypes or for a set of salesman samples, the fabric minimum from the fabric mill is usually 50 m, but for production the quantities are much higher. In the production stage the fabric mills will quote anything from 100 to 1000 m minimums. There are, of course, exceptions depending on what size of fabric mill you work with. The large mills in Asia, which are used to working with huge international companies, have very high minimum quantities and have less flexibility for smaller brands than the small Italian mills who have much more flexibility because they are used to working on smaller orders. The important point that needs to be understood is that most fabric mills will accommodate your sampling requests because they want to get production orders from you, as this is how they make their profit.
ALLOCATING FABRICS
The developer works closely with the designer to allocate the right fabrics to the designs, making sure that the weight, price and type of the fabric is both suitable for the garment’s construction and is alsoin line with the designer’s vision. Having a wide range of prices and styles of fabrics to choose from makes the allocation easier, but it is essential to understand what the designer wants from and for the garment.
THE RANGE PLAN AND ITS CONSEQUENCES TO FABRICS
The pyramid of basic, mid and top styles has already been introduced in the chapter on range planning, but for the sake of the fabric selection I will explain more about how the fabric prices affect the styles’ position. Understanding where the style is in the pyramid will help you to select a fabric that is suitable for price.
FABRIC PRICING
Quite simply, if the style is a basic level shirt with a low retail selling price, the cost of the fabric needs to be low also, so that the brand will have a good profit margin. At the top of the pyramid there are the high fashion styles with a high retail price. These styles (although this is not imperative) can have a higher priced, more exclusive fabric, as they need to be visually rich and impressive enough to entice the consumer. The brand will still want to make profit on these styles, so it is not an excuse to go crazy at a fabric fair, but there is certainly some leeway allowed.
ALLOCATING COLOUR
It has already been explained that colour is one of the four factors in the concept, and it is at this stage of the development process that the designer and the developer begin to consider the colours for each style and how the shades work with the proposed