As a fashion designer, you need to acquaint yourself with all the industry jargon; otherwise, you’ll have a hard time dealing with clients, partners, employees, and other vendors. One of the most common terms used in the fashion industry is ‘tech pack.’ The tech pack, or technical package, is a file shown to factories by brands as a sort of guide for producing clothing. It is an important part of every fashion design process, so you should be accustomed to it.
Therefore, the first question you have to consider is, how much does a tech pack cost, and how does it affect my fashion design business? This information is necessary to help you understand what you need to do and where you start.
This article will help you discover everything you need to know about tech packs in fashion so that you can make the right business decisions.
How Does a Tech Pack Work?
In fashion, a technical package is a type of file prepared by designers and presented to factories as a blueprint or outline for manufacturing attire. The document contains important details of every piece of the garment that a fashion designer or brand wants the factory to create, including instructions on how to prepare, create, and assemble the garments.
The tech pack is the blueprint used by factories that manufacture fashion items to ensure the products are created according to the designer’s specifications. This document is usually created when you’re producing large quantities of fashion items, so if you’re only producing small quantities of your garments, a spec sheet will be enough.
When creating your tech pack, make sure you include all the important elements to help your manufacturer get the job done quickly and successfully. If you don’t know how to create a tech pack or you don’t have the time to do it, you should hire tech pack designers. Luckily, you can easily find qualified and experienced freelance tech pack designers from reliable freelance job sites like Guru.
These designers have handled similar tasks many times before, so they have the required skills and experience to give you perfect tech packs. But make sure the people you hire for the job understand all the important aspects of a tech pack like colorways, grading guidelines, technical drawings, costing sheets, bills of materials, measurements, and construction specs.
A good tech pack designer should also know how to prepare reference images to show the manufacturer how to construct the garments. In short, they should be able to put together a professional tech pack with all the relevant details to help your factory effectively produce the intended garments.
Important Tips for Designing a Tech Pack in Fashion
Even when you have the best tech pack designer for your business, you also have to be involved in the design process so that whatever gets to the factory is exactly what you want. Here are some useful tips for creating a tech pack:
Include Images or Sketches
Make sure your tech pack designer includes clear and understandable images and sketches. Because the factory isn’t part of your brand, it may not fully understand the designs and patterns of your garments. This is why you need to provide them with a sketch of the intended garment showing all the necessary styles, seams, patterns, and other critical aspects of the product.
The images or sketches you include in your tech pack should be supported with text because, at times, the factory workers may not interpret the images the way you want them to. Furthermore, some images can wrongly depict important details for the final product. Therefore, your tech pack designer should have drawing skills to create clear and understandable sketches for your packs.
They should also know how to play around with different colors to create the preferred type of pattern. Colors can be very confusing since some of them appear different, depending on the type of screen you view them on. For example, blue might appear purple on certain screens or sheets.
Include All the Necessary Elements
To a layman, the content of a fashion tech pack may look like a collection of technical vocabulary, but to a professional fashion designer, it’s quite straightforward. Your designer must be aware of all the important elements of a tech pack and where each of them falls.
The most important things to put in your fashion tech pack include a product summary, technical flats, measurements, grading specifications, color definitions, construction details, bill of materials, care information, cost sheets, and comments.
Finally, a fashion tech pack is important for minimizing the risk of miscommunication between you and the factory, saving you a great deal of time and money. It also improves efficiency and minimizes the wasting of raw materials.
