What a 30-piece order taught us about sizing standards

Client background

This client is a Canadian brand whose style sits between casual and formal: shirts, knitwear, shorts, polos and trousers that work in an office but are cut and finished to be worn outside it.

• They found us the way most small brands do — after being turned away.
• Their first orders were genuinely small: around 30 pieces per design, and not one or two designs but a full range across many styles at once. For most factories that is the worst combination on the table: many styles, tiny quantities, full setup work for each. It is the kind of inquiry that gets quoted a 500-piece MOQ, a price that kills the margin, or no reply at all.
• We took it. Small, design-led brands are the accounts this factory is built around — and they paid full sample fees without being asked twice, which is how a small brand tells you it is serious.

What they needed from us

On paper the brief was simple: produce the range to their tech packs. Underneath it sat something they did not know to ask for.

They were careful about size — unusually careful. From the first samples onward, sizing questions kept coming: how a chest width was taken, where a shoulder seam sat, what tolerance we allowed. For a young brand selling online, fit is the product. Their customers buy from a website and an Instagram page, without trying anything on. A size run that fits wrong does not come back as a few returns; it comes back as their reputation.

We answered every question. We had not yet understood why they were asking.

What went wrong, and what we changed

The first size set we produced followed the measurement conventions every Chinese factory uses — the common sense way of taking a measurement that everyone here learns in their first week. The client rejected it. Not because the numbers were wrong: the same labelled points on the same size chart, measured a different way, produce a different garment.

It was the first time we had faced this. We had assumed a size chart was the agreement. It is not. The measurement method is the agreement, and neither side had written it down.

For a moment the order sat in dangerous territory: samples made, launch planned, both sides holding a different definition of the same centimetre. Let it run to bulk, and it becomes a full production run of garments that fit nobody — and at 30 pieces per design across a multi-style order, that is not a defect rate. That is the entire order.

So we stopped and did the slow thing. A Google Meet across the time difference, the size chart shared line by line — and we still talked past each other, until the client did something we now ask every client to do: they filmed a short video showing exactly how they measure, tape in hand, point by point. Two minutes of video ended a week of email.

We rebuilt their size spec around that method, re-checked the samples against it, and locked the method into their tech pack so every order since, theirs included, starts from an agreed way of measuring instead of an assumed one.

Cultural differences that mattered

Part of the problem was habit, not language. On our side of the table, a tech pack arrives and we execute it; questioning it feels like doubting the client. On their side, sending the chart was the start of a conversation, not the end of one. "Approved" also meant two things: we heard approval of the numbers; they meant approval of how the garment measures on the table.

Rhythm mattered too. A founder answers email in their evening, which is our morning. The dispute stretched while replies came once a day, and closed within hours once we moved to a call and a video. Since then, that is our default for any small brand's order: one call, one measurement video, then sampling.

Where the relationship is now

The brand has grown a loyal following on Instagram, orders twice a year at around 10,000 pieces an order, and most of the clothes on their website are made by us. The measurement video from that first dispute is still in their file. Their size spec has not changed since.