by Jessica Liu on Feb 3 2018

in Apparel Industry News, Fashion Trends, Supply Chain Managment, Events

How to do fast fashion and where to find the apparel manufacturers?

A little bird told me that you want to do fast fashion, is it?

Clothing inventory issue has become a fact, no longer increases the new more inventory become a topic in the apparel industry. Small trial + rapid re-order can not only reduce the initial investment, hot style won’t be out of the stock cause of the QRM (Quick Response Manufacturing) mode, and becomes more and more popular.

Top 4 points for choosing a QRM (Quick Response Manufacturing) apparel manufacturers:

1) Choose a factory has the same values as you

When choosing a supply chain, the quality and ability of the factory is a key of consideration, but this is the second point. The most important point is to make sure that the supplier boss has the same values as you.

If because of the different values, the factory does not cooperate well during the production, or with slower speed, the quality cannot guarantee, the delivery time delay or the after-sale service is not good, etc. Once the brand is not satisfied with the goods, the factory can’t make money, which is a waste (including time and money) for both parties.

2) What kind of factory suit for you?

For example:

• If the order quantity is about 1000 pieces of one style, so it is appropriate to select a medium-sized factory with about 100 people.
• If the average order is about 300 pieces, and then the factory with 100 people may a bit redundant, the small factory of about 30 people is more suitable.

To use the quick response manufacturing system doing fast fashion, we do not advise you to choose a big scale factory to operate your order. Because the quick response business model will generate appear many temporary emergency orders or insert new order demands, only the core customer of the factory them they will cooperate with your (temporary/emergency)needs.

But for the big factory, although they have many workers and well-equipped, the factory has a high demand for their customers at the same time.

So our suggestion is to be the core customer of the small factory, but do not be the smallest customer of the big factory.

3) Sharing information

There are 3 points included:

a.The sales condition

The apparel brand & manufacturer should be communicated timely about the sales condition, popularity, ranking information, then the factory can be prepared all the thing in advance.

b.The Production Schedule

The factory should be timely communicate with the purchaser, because now most of them doing e-commerce businesses, especially some online celebrity brand, they do not have a big merchandiser team. So only timely update progress information, once the order progress and expected have a deviation, they need to find the solution to solve those problems in advance, to prevent affect delivery date.

c.Market intelligence

We know ZARA has a super strong market sense and acuity. If a certain style or design becomes the new must-have on the street, Zara gets to work. Designers churn out the new styles and they’re fast-tracked to stores while the trend is still going strong.

As now more and more are online stores, as fabric factories, you may know which fabrics sell the most, which fabrics sell the best; And as a fast fashion brand, you can also know which is the best selling style, so if both the fabric supplier and fashion brand can share their market intelligence (or cooperated) with each other, that calls win-win.

4) Lower the cost

In near future, low cost and QRM (Quick Response Manufacturing) are the directions of the supply chain.

DC platform adopts a way of integrating all supply chain resources of the apparel industry, relying on our strong quick response system (included: Designing platform, cooperated fabric suppliers, cooperated different kinds of garment manufacturers, logistic company etc.) and controlling costs from the source of the fabrics/accessories. Combined with the different factory resources, we can reduce the cost as much as possible while ensuring the quality, and provide new products for the brand, small online brand, and even Internet celebrity shops.

More Relate article about  DC platform :

1 .  What We Do ? 

2. DC PLATFORM : New Energy of Apparel Industry – Quick Response Manufacturing

3. Designers & Quality Assurance Updated Of B2B DC Platform 

4. How Chinese Use DT (Date Technology) to reforms apparel industry based on IMS and Quick Response?

5. Apparel Supply Chain + Intelligent Store

6. How to operated the Design Interconnection of DC?

7. How DC integrate all resource to make quick response manufacturing of apparel supply chain?

9. How to use fabric supplier doing ORM ( Quick Response Manufacturing ) mode?

10. Five Important Points to choose an appropriate apparel factroy.

11. How to  Make your Traditional Apparel Chain into a Quick Response Manufacturing ( QRM) ?

12. Top 3 points of quality control of clothing you should know.