Quality Control in clothing manufacturing (QC) is one of the most critical and demanding roles in the garment industry. Without a robust quality control process in place, your clothing factory is risking your brand’s reputation and you could lose a lot of revenue on returns.
But what does a Quality Control (QC) department do and why is it so important?
Quality Control in Clothing Manufacturing
The main responsibility of the quality control department is to check all fabrics, components, and clothes to ensure they’ve been manufactured to the highest quality.
There are quality control teams for every stage of the clothing manufacturing process. As part of a thorough quality control process, QC teams check the following things:
- the integrity of your fabrics before and after dyeing, printing, or sewing;
- integrity of components and trims before and after sewing;
- the accuracy of measurements against the tech specs;
- the accuracy of surface designs for embroidery and prints;
- integrity and quality of stitching.
But what you might not know is the quality control team also provides finishing stitches, any hand trimming, hand fraying, and other handiwork that completes a garment.
You can see how this looks in one of our Instagram posts.
It can be said that the quality control department is the last line of defence before your completed garments are packed and sent to you.
How Can Brands Ensure Quality Control is Being Done Properly?
Most brands are located overseas from their factories. Here at CM Garmindo, 99% of our clients are located overseas from us.
This makes it difficult to know whether you’re getting good quality control before your garments are shipped to you.
As a brand owner, there’s three things you can do to ensure your quality control in clothing manufacturing.
Request Clothing Samples:
This might come as a surprise but many factories don’t provide clothing samples. Crazy, right?
This is the only true way to check the quality of your potential future bulk production. You need to assess the quality of your factory’s work by ordering samples.
By the way, did you know we offer free garment samples? Oh yes!
Order Fabric Samples:
Most factories will send you swatches of their fabrics so you can get a hand-feel of your options.
But what you should also be looking at is the condition of their samples books. Many factories just staple fabrics into cheap booklets and hand-write notes which are often not in your language.
This is important because it tells you if your factory pays attention to detail.
Tour Your Factory:
One of the best ways to see if you’ll be getting good quality control is to visit your factory.
Visually seeing the people, the place, the spaces where your factory conducts its quality control will tell you more about your factory than you can get from just receiving garments in the mail.
However, you should always make an appointment. Factories are busy places and their showrooms contain private client intellectual property. Be mindful of this.
CM Garmindo’s Quality Control: An Inside Look
At CM Garmindo, we have a 10-Point quality control system that checks everything from end-to-end before a garment is ever released.
The process starts in our Supply Chain department. As fabrics and components are received, they’re checked for issues before being catalogued.
Issues can be anything from a colour irregularity on a fabric to a scratch on a gold zipper.
As the fabrics and components are processed into clothing, they’re passed through more quality control stages.
Fabrics are checked during the fabric relaxing stage. They’re checked during dyeing or printing. They’re checked during cutting.
Clothing samples are checked after completion. Garments are checked during and after bulk productions.
We also check the quality of labels and tags as they’re applied to your garments.
Quality control in clothing manufacturing needs to be an end-to-end process. Well, it is at CM Garmindo, anyway.
Check out this Instagram post to see quality control in action.
How to Get the Best Quality Control for Your Clothing Brand
If you’re looking for a premium quality garment manufacturer, with excellent quality control in clothing manufacturing, you’ve come to the right place.
Due to our robust quality control standards, CM Garmindo is known as one of the top premium quality clothing manufacturers in the region.
It’s no surprise that we get rave reviews from our clients.
Getting in touch with us is super easy. Visit our website, have a look around to see our work, then drop us a message in any of the contact forms.
Our Client Services department is waiting to assist you now.
