How to produce your first fashion collection.

The single highest-leverage decision in your first collection is made before any factory is involved: how many styles you produce. Every style you add multiplies cost and time, because each one needs its own pattern, its own sample cycle, and its own production setup. Fifteen loose styles read like a mood board; a tight capsule of three to six styles reads like a brand. Editing is not a compromise of your vision, it is the first professional skill of running a label.

A structure that works, season after season: one hero piece that carries the photography and the story, two or three core pieces that carry the revenue, and one entry piece at an accessible price that lets a new customer say yes. Keep the capsule inside one fabric family and one silhouette story, and everything gets cheaper, faster, and more coherent at once. With a five unit minimum per style, a four style capsule is twenty finished garments: enough to shoot a campaign, dress your first customers, and take a rack to a buyer.

A sketch communicates intent: silhouette, proportion, mood. A tech pack is an engineering document: the file a factory can build from without asking you a hundred questions. The confusion between the two stalls more first collections than money does, so it is worth being precise about which door requires which document.

Which you need depends on where you knock. A production-only factory expects a finished tech pack at the door. A vertically integrated house takes the sketch and drafts the pack with you; that is what a design fee pays for. At Maisone, development from $2,500 per style turns references into a working pattern and a complete tech pack, and the document is yours to keep whether or not you continue to production.

Two garments cut from the same pattern in different cloths are two different designs. Weight, drape, and stretch decide how the silhouette actually reads on a body, which is why experienced designers choose fabric before they finalise a sketch, not after. Never commit to a cloth you have only seen on a screen: order sample yardage, sew with it, wash it, and wear it before it goes anywhere near a production run.

The practical layer matters just as much. Mills sell in-stock fabrics with short lead times and custom developments with long ones, and most mills have their own minimums, which is why your maker's existing mill relationships are worth asking about directly. Choose with reorders in mind: a discontinued cloth means re-sourcing, re-sampling, and re-photographing the style you just proved. A good production partner will tell you which fabrics on their floor are proven, repeatable, and in stock; that short conversation routinely saves first collections weeks.

Sampling is where your collection stops being an idea and starts being a garment, and it is the stage first-time designers most often try to rush. Each step below exists to catch a specific class of mistake while it is still cheap to fix.

One distinction worth knowing before you sign anything: a sample that fails to match the agreed specification should be remade at the maker's cost, while a design change you request after seeing the sample is new work, honestly billed. Ask any factory how they draw that line. The ones who answer clearly, in writing, are the ones to trust with a run.

Numbers vary by category and construction, but the shape of a first-collection budget is remarkably consistent: a development fee per style, a sampling cost per iteration, and a per-unit production price. Here is the worked example using our own rate card, which follows the same structure you should expect from any honest small-batch house.

Plan the calendar backwards from launch. If you want to ship in spring, sampling belongs in winter and the brief belongs in autumn. And when you price your garments, price from the full picture, not the unit cost alone: freight, duties, packaging, promotional units, and returns all live between your factory invoice and your margin.

• Too many styles. Ten styles at launch splits your budget ten ways and your story ten ways. Six or fewer, done properly, outsells them.
• Skipping the fit stage to save weeks. The toile and fit sample exist to catch expensive mistakes cheaply. Skipping them does not remove the mistakes, it moves them into your production run.
• Choosing fabric from a screen. Colour lies on monitors and drape cannot be photographed. Sample yardage first, always.
• Pricing from unit cost alone. A $60 unit cost does not mean a $120 retail price works. Count freight, duties, packaging, promo pieces, and returns before you print a price tag.
• Producing maximum inventory before proof. The old model said commit to hundreds of units and pray. The better model: produce five, sell them, learn, and reorder what the market already voted for.