What Is a Tech Pack? And Why Factories Send Them Back

What has to be in a tech pack before a factory can quote it

At minimum:

• Flat technical sketches, front and back, with callouts.
• A graded spec sheet: every point of measure, every size, with tolerances.
• A bill of materials naming every fabric, trim, thread, label and component, with suppliers or references.
• Construction detail: seam types, stitch density, topstitch placement, finishing.
• Labelling, packing and care requirements.
• Colorways, and how they map to the materials.

That list is table stakes and every competitor page has some version of it. The gap is that a pack can contain all six and still be unquotable, which is the next section.

Why most tech packs get sent back

Five things we see repeatedly. All of them come from real packs that arrived at a factory and stalled.

1. Incomplete measurements on part of the garment. A pack that is complete everywhere except the hood, or the length. Partial is functionally the same as missing, because the factory still cannot grade it.
2. A component visible in the photos but absent from the pack. A fleece backing, a hidden pocket, a reinforcement panel. Present in the imagery, missing from the BOM, so it is unpriced and unsourced.
3. Renderings that do not match the latest design. The design moved on, the visuals did not. Now the factory is holding two contradictory sources of truth and has to ask which one is real.
4. Spec measurements not ordered by size. A spec sheet that lists points of measure out of size sequence forces the factory to reorder it before grading. Small thing. It stops the quote.
5. A spec error nobody caught. One brand's design studio specified a backing 15mm off what the construction actually needed. The factory caught it, not the studio. That is the pattern in miniature: the error was found by the people who build things, not the people who draw them.

None of these are exotic. They are what happens when a pack is produced by a designer working alone, without anyone downstream checking it against how the garment actually gets made.

Is a tech pack enough, or do you need patterns too?

They are different deliverables and this catches people constantly.

A tech pack describes the garment. A pattern is the set of pieces the factory cuts. You can hand over a beautiful, complete tech pack and still be weeks away from production, because the pattern has to be built before anything is cut.

Here is the part that surprises people: most factories would rather make the pattern themselves. They know their machines and their operators, and they trust their own pattern maker over one they have never met. So arriving without pattern files is not usually what stalls a quote.

It matters for a different reason. If the factory builds the pattern, the factory owns the pattern, and that is how brands get locked into a supplier without ever deciding to. Ask any studio quoting you tech pack work whether patterns are included and who owns them afterwards. Who owns your patterns covers what to ask for and how to check.

Excel, PLM, or a template: does the format matter?

Less than people think, and more than nothing.

We have taken in packs built in Excel, in PLM systems, and from downloaded tech pack templates. A well-built Excel pack from someone who understands construction beats a PLM export from someone who does not. One brand we work with runs everything in old-school Excel and is further along technically than most companies ten times their size.

What actually matters is whether the information is complete, internally consistent, and ordered the way a factory reads it. Format is a distant second to that.

Where PLM earns its keep is version control. When the design changes, a PLM system updates one source of truth. A folder of spreadsheets and PDFs is where omission three on the list above comes from.

If you are starting from a downloaded tech pack template, treat it as a checklist rather than a finished artifact. Templates are good at reminding you which fields exist. They cannot tell you whether your stitch spec is buildable.

What does a tech pack cost?

It depends almost entirely on who makes it, and the range is wide.

Design studios and innovation firms sit at the top. We have had brands tell us they paid in the $60,000 to $70,000 range to a studio for design and technical work, and then found the studio would not help them place it with a factory. Impressive work, expensive, and it stops short of finished. Freelancers and specialist tech pack services are dramatically cheaper per style. AI tools will now generate a plausible-looking pack in seconds, which is genuinely useful as a starting point and genuinely dangerous as an endpoint.

Inside a development retainer, tech pack work is usually scoped as part of the program rather than billed per document, which is how we handle it.

The number that actually matters is not the pack price. It is the cost of a pack that fails: rework before the factory will quote, extra sample rounds, and in the worst cases a production run that misses spec. We have seen a finished garment arrive three inches longer than the spec called for, and another order land nine centimetres over on length, with nobody on the factory floor to catch either. Those cost far more than the difference between a cheap pack and a good one.

Do you need one before you contact a factory?

No, and waiting can cost you.

A serious factory will talk to you with sketches, reference garments and a clear description of what you are trying to build. What they cannot do without a pack is quote you accurately or start sampling. So the honest sequence is: talk early, then invest in the pack once you know the factory can actually make your product at your volume.

Getting a pack built before you have picked a partner also risks paying for a document that then needs reworking to that specific factory's standards.

How we build tech packs

We build packs from the factory side, which is the whole point. Our team sits in Saigon, close enough to the lines to check a spec against how the garment will actually be sewn before it becomes a problem.

A full tech pack build runs about two weeks, typically concurrent with material sourcing rather than after it. Patterns and grading are part of the work, not a separate purchase, and the brand owns them.

If you are arriving with an existing pack, we will tell you honestly whether it is quotable as-is or needs rework, before you commit to anything.

If you want to know how tech pack work is scoped inside a program, what counts as an active style explains the unit we quote against. If your next question is about minimums, what is MOQ covers where those numbers come from.