WTF Is a Denim Garment Technologist? And Does Your Brand Need One?
Scenario 1
Your sample arrives.
It looks like it was made for a different species of human you’ve never met.
You try it on and discover you can’t even squeeze your bum in. You manage to get one leg into it but you can’t bend your knee. You’re fixed in place and feel sick at the thought of maybe having to ask the postman to help you get out of it.
Panic.
You’ve spent $250 on a sample and you don’t even know where to start fixing it.
How do I get out of this garment?
Why didn’t they follow the tech pack?
You finally peel off the tiny garment and frantically check the measurements, but they make no sense.
Where is the rise?
What is a fork??!!
Scenario 2
Sampling was a breeze. Easy peasy. A total dream.
Factory says they work with everyone.
The jeans look great.
All approved. Production done. What was the big deal?
Shopify’d, Insta’d, TikTok’d. Sold out. Done.
…
Ping.
Ping.
Ping.
Size 16/18/20 doesn’t fit properly.
The waist is gaping.
The thigh is too tight.
The black wash fits completely differently to the blue.
I can’t sit down in them.
If either of these sounds familiar, welcome to the secret underground world of the Garment Technologist.
We are the IYKYK part of the fashion industry.
Everyone knows what a fashion designer does and everyone knows what a factory does.
The big, messy, absolutely critical bit in the middle is where a Garment Tech lives.
Spotting one in the wild is easy.
Look for a tape measure draped around the neck like jewellery and listen for the signature call:
“£180 for stretch jeans? The yoke isn’t even the right shape!”
If you hear that sound, a Garment Tech is nearby.
Fit, construction, fabric, quality, testing, feasibility, production, compliance, care labels.
We’re clothing engineers.
The oracles of clothes.
Sometimes, unfortunately, we are also the fun police.
If you’re trying to develop an innovative product and have no idea where to start, we are your people.
If you need to reduce cost without losing the integrity and design of your product, a Garment Tech will find a way.
If you have production problems, we'll work directly with your factory to fix them.
And if you're making jeans, there's another layer of chaos to throw into the mix.
Fit, fabric, wash, shrinkage, stretch, recovery, grading and construction all have to play nicely together.
When they don't, I want to know why.
So What Does a Garment Technologist Actually Do?
Quite a lot, as it turns out.
The Tech Pack
Your tech pack is the holy scripture of your garment.
When your factory is lost and confused, they should be able to turn to the tech pack and find the answer.
You never want a factory guessing what you want.
A good tech pack isn’t just drawings and measurements.
During the process of creating it, a Garment Tech is assessing feasibility, thinking about construction, finding ways to reduce costs and spotting potential quality risks before you've made 2,000 of them.
With jeans, your factory needs considerably more than a sketch of a nice wide leg and a note saying “vintage wash”.
I want to know the measurements.
Construction, stitching, weight and composition, trims, hardware, pocket positioning, wash and finishing, testing requirements, labelling, the list goes on.
All the information the factory needs to make your jeans rather than their interpretation of some jeans that look a bit like the picture you sent them.
Product Development
Maybe you want a denim shirt with two head holes.
An upside-down denim dress for someone who walks on their hands.
Jeans that look like sleeping bags.
Or, more likely, you’re making a beautiful pair of jeans and want the fit, spec and quality to match the price point.
Garment Techs love to get stuck into product development right from the start, advising on fabric, quality and construction to make things happen.
And denim gives us plenty to think about.
What sort of denim actually works for the fit you're trying to create?
Rigid or stretch?
How is that fabric going to behave after wash?
Can the factory achieve the finish you're imagining?
Is that construction appropriate for the product and price point?
Are the trims up to the job?
Is your design actually feasible in production?
If anyone reading this does want to develop something really weird, obviously you need to loop me in immediately.
Fit & Sizing
If you’ve ever bought something that fits horribly (you have), you’ll understand how difficult it is to get fit right.
Garment Techs look at fit samples.
We take lots of pictures and write down loads of comments.
We draw wiggly lines and massive arrows all over the photos to explain to the factory in clear detail how to fix it.
We tell you whether you can proceed to the next stage or whether this sample is so catastrophically wrong that the only sensible next step is to give it a respectful funeral and never speak of it again.
Sometimes the measurements are perfect, but the garment still feels off.
It might be the pitch of the legs.
The shape of the rise or yoke.
The balance.
Or just the amount of fabric being fed into the waistband.
Do you know what those things mean?
If not, you probably need professional help.
With jeans, this is where things get particularly interesting.
The waist might be gaping, but the problem isn't necessarily the waist.
There might be drag lines around the front, but randomly removing fabric from there is likely to make the issue worse.
The leg might be twisting, they might be clinging in all the wrong places, they might look perfect when you stand still but you literally cannot for the life of you sit down in them.
One wash might fit beautifully while another version made from exactly the same pattern suddenly feels too small.
A Garment Tech's job isn't just to say what looks wrong.
It's to work out why it's happening and turn that into something the factory can actually correct.
We create blocks, set tolerances and benchmark competitors.
All these things help make your size range feel consistent, professional and trustworthy.
Grading
Grading is very technical.
Please do not guess it.
It's not just making the garment bigger.
And please do not blindly accept the factory’s version without understanding what they're actually doing.
Your factory's standard grade might be absolutely fine, but I want to know who it's intended to fit, whether it works for your customer and what happens to your product as we move further away from the size you've actually fitted.
With jeans, we're thinking about how the waist, hip, rise, thigh, knee and leg shape change across the range.
We're thinking about whether the pockets are still proportional in both size and position.
We're thinking about whether your size 20 still looks like the same jean as your size 10.
And if you're offering a broad size range, I really want to physically fit another size further up that range before production rather than crossing my fingers and asking Excel to take care of it.
I have written an entire article about grading because apparently this is who I am now.
Quality Control, Compliance and Textile Testing
Ah yes.
Testing.
The bit every fashion brand owner dreams about when starting their brand.
Do you want customer complaints because your jeans dyed their sofa, car seat and children blue?
Do you want returns piling up because the jeans have been overwashed and the pockets are literally falling off?
(That second one is a nightmare I have experienced first hand and let me tell you, it was not good times.)
I'm going to guess you said no to both questions.
Therefore, you need proper testing and quality control.
A Garment Tech can read lab reports, explain failures, advise on solutions, reject fabrics when necessary, help establish testing requirements, guide you through quality inspections and, for smaller productions, sometimes act as your QC eyes too.
With denim, we might be looking at things like dimensional stability, colourfastness, fabric performance, stretch and recovery, seam performance and what your wash process is doing to the finished garment.
Your beautiful approved sample being fine isn't enormously helpful if bulk production comes out of the laundry capable of being torn apart with your bare hands.
Production
This is another bit of the job that tends to be invisible until something goes wrong.
Your samples are approved.
Now we need tens, hundreds or thousands of them to come out looking like the thing you approved.
The Garment Tech helps bridge that gap.
Are the bulk measurements within tolerance?
Does the wash match the approved standard?
Are trims correct?
Has anything changed from the Gold Seal or approved sample?
Is the factory flagging something that needs a technical decision?
Are all your different washes actually fitting consistently?
Production is where all the tiny decisions made during development suddenly become very expensive if they weren't right.
Which is why I would quite like to find the problems before the jeans are sitting in your warehouse.
Do You Need a Garment Technologist?
If you're making clothes, probably at some point, yes.
You don't necessarily need one sitting next to you five days a week, but you do need someone who understands what happens in the massive gap between:
“I've designed this.”
and
“I've got 2,000 of these sitting in a warehouse.”
Factories make clothes. They might make for other amazing brands, but the reason those clothes turn out so well is usually because of the technical input they've been given beforehand.
No shade to factories, there are many excellent factories that can handle product development to an exceptional level.
The problem is, you might not find out that yours can't until it's too late.
A Garment Tech is there to ask the questions before they become expensive problems.
Will this actually work?
Why does that fit like that?
What happens when my customer washes it?
Will it still fit properly in a size 20?
Why does the black wash fit differently to the blue?
Is the factory interpreting this the way you intended?
Sometimes we have to guide you towards a more realistic option.
Other times we're so excited by your creativity that we'll do everything we can to make the weird thing work for you.
Mostly, we're the people who save you from discovering a problem after you've already made thousands of them.
If your sample arrives looking strange, your inbox is overflowing with complaints, or you really, really don't want to gamble your precious savings on a production run with crossed fingers, find a Garment Tech who specialises in your product area.
Preferably before production.
And if the product you're making happens to be jeans...
Hello.
Got a problem with your jeans?
If your fit is off, your samples are going round in circles or your factory communication is making you question your life choices, tell me what's going on.