You spent six weeks on the tech pack. Every measurement graded, every stitch called out, the GSM locked at 400. You sent it Tuesday. It is now the following Thursday and you have nothing.

The tech pack was never the problem. It was the only thing you sent.

The Direct Answer

Besides the tech pack, a clothing manufacturer needs four things before they can quote you: your target quantity per style and per colorway, your delivery deadline with the actual reason behind it, your target landed cost per unit, and your reference samples. Without these, a tech pack is a drawing, not a production request.

Factories do not quote drawings. They quote jobs. A job has a size, a date, and a price ceiling.

Quantities, Broken Down the Way They Think

Do not tell a factory you want 500 units. Tell them 500 units across two styles, three colorways each, in a size run weighted toward medium and large.

Those are completely different conversations. The first sounds like a decent order. The second is roughly 83 pieces per colorway, which for most knitwear factories is below the fabric minimum before the machine even turns on.

This is where founders get blindsided. The garment MOQ and the fabric MOQ are two separate walls, and the fabric one is usually taller. Dye houses often will not run below 300 to 500 meters per color, so your three colorway plan quietly triples your fabric commitment.

Send the breakdown. Style, color, size curve, total. A sourcing manager can price that in twenty minutes. A vague number sits in the inbox until it dies.

If you are not sure whether your quantities put you in range for a given factory, that is exactly the gap factory matching exists to close. Guessing costs you six weeks of rejections.

Your Deadline, and the Reason Behind It

"ASAP" is not a date. Neither is "sometime in fall."

Give a delivery date and give the why. A factory schedules differently for a founder chasing a Black Friday drop than for one with a wholesale purchase order and a cancel date. One is flexible. The other is a legal cliff.

Here is the timeline nobody hands you upfront:

1. Sampling: three to six weeks. Longer if the fabric needs sourcing.
2. Lab dips and approvals: one to two weeks. These are your color swatches, dyed and returned for sign off. Every round of rejection adds seven days.
3. Fit rounds: two to four weeks. Assume two rounds minimum. Three if it is your first product.
4. Bulk production: four to eight weeks. Depends on fabric lead time far more than sewing capacity.
5. Shipping: five days by air, thirty to forty by sea.

Add it up. From approved tech pack to boxes in your hands is realistically four to six months. Founders routinely plan for eight weeks and then spend the difference in air freight, which can eat an entire margin on a heavy garment.

Tell the factory your date early and they will tell you if it is fantasy. That honesty is worth more than a good quote.

Your Target Price, Yes, Actually

Founders hide their budget because they think naming a number caps the quote. The opposite is true.

A factory that knows you are aiming for a nine dollar FOB on a hoodie will immediately tell you whether that is achievable, and if not, exactly what to change. Drop the ribbed cuff. Move from a French terry at 400 GSM to 340. Cut the embroidery to a single placement. Those are engineering decisions, and factories make them fast when they know the target.

Say nothing and you get a quote at fourteen dollars, you go quiet, and they assume you were never serious.

The Essentials fleece silhouette that everyone wants to replicate is not expensive because of the fabric. It is expensive because of the wash, the trim quality, and the fit tolerance. Naming your ceiling forces the conversation about which of those three you actually care about.

Reference Samples Beat Reference Images

Send a physical garment. This is the single highest leverage thing in the entire process and almost nobody does it.

A tech pack tells a factory the measurements. A reference sample tells them the hand feel, the drape, the stitch density, the way the collar recovers after a wash. You can write "soft, structured, premium" in a spec box and three factories will interpret it three ways. You cannot misinterpret a garment sitting on the table.

Buy the Aimé Leon Dore piece. Cut it apart if you have to. Ship it.

If shipping is not possible, send close photos of the seam construction, the inside of the collar, and the hem. Not the product shot from the website. The parts nobody photographs.

What Nobody Tells You About the First Email

Factories triage. A sourcing manager at a decent Portugal or Vietnam facility opens somewhere between forty and eighty inquiries a week and replies to maybe fifteen.

They are not reading your tech pack in that first pass. They are scanning for three signals: Is this person going to be a headache? Is this order worth the setup cost? Do they know what they are asking for?

Attach a fifty page PDF with no context in the body and you have failed all three before anyone opens the file. Put the quantities, the date, the target price, and one sentence about your brand directly in the email body. The tech pack is the attachment, not the pitch.

And a quieter one: if your tech pack has gaps, factories will notice and price defensively. Missing POM measurements or an unspecified trim supplier means they are guessing, and guessing gets priced in as risk. A tech pack reviewed by someone who has sat on the factory side of the table pays for itself in the first quote. Our pro partners do exactly that work, usually in days rather than weeks.

The One Line That Changes Everything

Add this to your first email: "This is our first production run and we know we have things to learn. Tell us what you need from us."

It sounds small. It is not. It signals you are coachable, which is the trait factories value most in an emerging brand and the one they almost never see. Founders arrive convinced they know the process and then argue about a fourteen day fabric lead time that has never been shorter than fourteen days for anyone.

The brands that scale are the ones the factory wants to keep. That relationship starts in the first email, not the fifth order.

What to Do Next

Take the tech pack you already have. Open a blank email and write the four things above it: quantities broken by style and color, your delivery date and the reason, your target cost, and what reference sample is on its way.

If that email feels thin, the problem was never the factory. It was the brief.

Once you have that ready, the next question is which factories should receive it, and that answer depends on your fabric, your volume, and your tolerance for lead time. Start there before you send anything.