Spec Sheet or Shade Card: What to Send a Mill on Day One

Most enquiries stall for the same reason

A mill cannot quote a fabric it cannot picture. The enquiries that get a same-day answer arrive with a construction, a quantity and a physical reference. The enquiries that take two weeks arrive as a sentence: we need navy uniform fabric, please send your best rate.

The second one is not lazy, it is just unaware of what the mill needs to price. Every missing field becomes a question, every question is a round trip, and a supplier trying to be helpful ends up quoting against an assumption that turns out wrong at sampling.

Our guides already cover what a spec sheet contains and how swatches differ from shade cards. This is the practical version: what to actually put in the envelope and the email on day one.

The eleven fields that make a fabric quotable

• Composition and blend ratio, for example 65/35 poly-viscose. The blend decides the dye class, so getting it wrong changes everything downstream.
• GSM in grams per square metre. If you quote weight per running metre instead, state the width alongside it or the number cannot be resolved.
• Width, and say whether it is cuttable or total. Cuttable width excludes the selvedge and is typically an inch or two narrower. A marker costed on 58 inches against 56 inches cuttable raises consumption per garment silently.
• Yarn count for warp and weft separately, with the system named. Ne is indirect, so higher means finer. Denier is direct, so higher means coarser. Thirty count and thirty denier are not near each other.
• Ends and picks per inch, measured on finished relaxed fabric. Same yarn and same weave at different EPI and PPI is a different fabric with different weight, cover and tear strength.
• Weave: plain, twill and its ratio, matty, dobby. Twill and plain at identical GSM are different products with different drape and crease behaviour.
• Finish. Anti-crease, soil release, water repellent, mercerised, calendered. Finish sits on top of the base fabric, so omitting it means you are being quoted for something else.
• Shrinkage tolerance with a test method, for example maximum 3 percent warp and weft to ISO 6330 and ISO 5077. Around 3 percent is the commonly accepted tolerance for woven apparel fabric.
• Colour fastness grades with methods: washing to ISO 105-C06, rubbing to ISO 105-X12, light to ISO 105-B02, perspiration to ISO 105-E04. Without agreed pass marks there is no basis to reject a batch.
• Quantity per shade and in total. Mills quote against a minimum per colour, not just per fabric, because each shade is a dye lot.
• End use and delivery date. End use decides which durability and fastness grades genuinely apply; an open-ended delivery date gets a padded quote.

Send a cutting, not a photo

The single highest-value thing in the envelope is a physical piece of fabric. A screen is emissive red, green and blue light; fabric is reflective dye on fibre. Different monitors respond differently to identical values, ambient light shifts perception, and no calibration closes that gap. A hex code or a phone photo is not a colour standard and cannot be treated as one.

Pantone numbers are better but carry a specific trap. TCX is the shade dyed onto cotton; TPG is the same number printed as ink on paper. Only around 60 to 80 percent of paper chips are a good match to their cotton equivalent, and then only under D65 daylight. Blacks, navies, bottle greens, scarlets and dark reds are the known failures, because paper cannot build that depth of colour. Those are exactly the shades uniform programs live on.

So: use the paper chip to choose, convert to a TCX reference to specify, and send a physical cutting if you have one. Label it with the fibre content, weight, width and end use, and say clearly whether you are matching its colour, its construction, or both.

What happens after the mill has it

• Enquiry: you send the spec and quantity, the mill returns feasibility, minimum per shade, indicative price and lead time.
• Spec lock: both sides agree the written spec with tolerances on shrinkage, fastness, GSM and width. The mill sends a hanger or cutting of the base quality.
• Colour standard hands over: your TCX reference and physical cutting go to the dye lab, which computes an initial recipe.
• Lab dip: the lab sends two or three graded options, typically around six inches square. They are assessed in a light box under multiple illuminants, D65 plus a store-light source, because two samples can match under one light and differ under another. That effect is metamerism and it is why one light source is not enough.
• Approved lab dip: you sign one. It becomes the physical standard and the recipe is locked to a production card. Budget 7 to 10 working days with two or three revisions, and plan the calendar around approval cycles rather than around weaving time.
• Bulk production, then a shade band or continuity card: a cutting from every roll, grouped lighter to darker and approved before cutting.
• Reorder: you reference the approved lab dip and recipe number rather than restarting colour development. Only the new lot's shade band needs approving.

What to do if you do not have a spec

Plenty of buyers are working from a garment rather than a document, and that is fine. Courier a cutting of the fabric you currently use, roughly the size of your palm or larger, and say what you want kept and what you want changed. Heavier, same shade. Same weight, better fade resistance. A mill can reverse-engineer construction from a physical sample far more reliably than it can from a description.

The mill will then hand you back the spec sheet you did not have, which becomes the document every future reorder and every future supplier comparison runs against. That is worth more than the first quotation.

The one-line version

Blend, GSM, cuttable width, weave, counts, quantity per shade, delivery date, end use, plus a physical cutting. Nine things in one email and one envelope, and the conversation starts at the quotation instead of at the questionnaire.