What Is MOQ, and How to Get a Small Run Made

Why do factories set minimums at all?

Two things, mostly.

The first is fabric. Mills do not weave or knit to order in small quantities. Across Taiwan, China and Vietnam the standard sits at roughly 3,000 meters per fabric and 1,000 meters per color, and Vietnam often runs higher than that. Your factory has to buy at that scale or find someone to share the roll with. If your order needs 400 meters, somebody is eating the other 2,600.

The second is changeover. Setting up a line means new patterns, new markers, retrained operators, test sews, and a first-off inspection before real production starts. That cost is identical whether the run is 300 units or 30,000. Spread across 30,000 it vanishes. Spread across 300 it becomes the largest line item on your cost sheet.

Most explanations stop at "economies of scale," which is true and useless. MOQ is the fabric minimum plus the changeover cost, divided by how many units you will commit to. Every lever below works by attacking one of those two numbers.

What are typical MOQs by product type?

Rough bands, and they move more with material than with garment type.

Simple knits like tees and basic hoodies carry the lowest minimums, mostly because the fabric is likely to be a stock quality the mill already holds. Cut-and-sew wovens run higher, since shirting, pants, and outerwear shells take more pattern work and more changeover time. Engineered or custom-developed knits sit highest of all, and that number comes almost entirely from the mill rather than the factory. Bags and hard goods work differently again, because tooling and hardware set the floor instead of fabric.

Treat any published table of garment-type MOQs with suspicion, including this one. A tee in a stock jersey and a tee in a custom-developed fabric are the same garment with a tenfold difference in minimum.

Five levers that actually lower your MOQ

1. Use a fabric the mill already holds. This is the biggest lever by a wide margin, because choosing from stock qualities removes the mill minimum from the equation entirely. You lose some differentiation. You gain the ability to run hundreds instead of thousands.
2. Share the fabric across styles. Two or three styles in the same fabric hit the mill minimum together, so your per-style commitment drops without the factory absorbing anything.
3. Share the minimum across colorways, or cut one. Brands ask us about this more than anything else. Every colorway you add carries its own 1,000 meter minimum on top of the 3,000 for the fabric itself, so a four-color story is a very different order to a two-color one. Where the color happens decides how much room you have: piece-dyed fabric can sometimes be split across colorways against a single greige minimum, while yarn-dyed and printed goods usually cannot.
4. Simplify the construction. Fewer panels and fewer specialty machine operations. This one attacks changeover rather than fabric, so it still works when the fabric is locked.
5. Commit to a repeat. A factory quoting 1,000 units for a one-off will often quote lower on a first run if the second run is contracted. You are buying down their changeover cost with certainty instead of volume.

What does not work

Asking for a discount on the minimum. An MOQ is not a price, so there is nothing to discount, and the request tells the factory you have not understood what you are looking at.

Splitting one order across several factories to duck under each one's minimum. You have just bought yourself a fit and color consistency problem, and you will find it late.

Accepting an under-MOQ surcharge without doing the math first. Most factories will run below their stated minimum for a price, and that price is usually 1.5 times FOB. Sometimes the trade is correct, because getting to market at all beats a perfect cost sheet you never use. Often it means paying half again per unit for a quantity you still cannot sell through, which is the worst of both.

The hidden cost of going small

Low volume is not free. Fixed costs land on fewer units, so landed cost per piece goes up, and it goes up faster than most first-time founders model.

The gap between quoted and actual is where brands get hurt. We regularly meet brands paying $12 to $14 for a tee that should land at $6 to $9 at their volume, and $12 to $14 for a hat that should land at $2 to $4. Some of that is markup they cannot see. Some of it is the 1.5x under-MOQ multiple showing up inside the unit price without ever being named as a surcharge, which is why the number feels arbitrary when you first see it.

Run the per-unit number at your real quantity before you fall in love with a fabric. If the margin does not work at 500 units, it does not work, and persuading a factory to accept 500 units has not fixed anything.

What happens when the factory raises your MOQ after you grow?

This one catches people, and it is worth knowing about before it happens to you.

A factory takes you on at a workable minimum while you are small. You succeed. Your orders get bigger and more regular. Then the minimum moves, sometimes to 5,000 or 10,000 units, because your account is now large enough for them to optimize around and small runs no longer fit how they want to schedule the line.

The number itself is not the damage. The damage is what it does to your next buying decision. You either commit to a quantity your demand does not support and carry the difference as inventory, or you walk and start qualifying a new supplier from scratch. Both cost money. The first costs it quietly, and you do not feel it until the stock is still sitting there two seasons later.

The defence is boring and it works. Keep your fabric choices portable, and keep your patterns and tech packs in your own hands. Then make sure one relationship is never the only place your product can be made.

How we run low-volume programs

We are built for high mix and low volume, which is a different business from a factory optimizing for long runs. We are based in Saigon, close enough to sit on the line when something goes wrong.

In practice that means we scope by active style rather than by unit count, and we work from a stock fabric program so the mill minimum stops being the binding constraint on most projects.

Our floors are 600 units per style and 200 per color. Engineered knits are the exception at around 1,800, because the mill sets that one and no amount of goodwill on our side changes it. None of these are a promise that every project runs at 600. A fabric choice can still overrule us. They are where the conversation starts rather than where it ends.

If you are working out what your range costs to scope, what counts as an active style explains the unit we quote against. If you want a production brief a factory can price without three rounds of questions, the Brief Builder will draft one with you.