One Approved Cloth, Three Stitching Units, Three Cities: Why the Garments Still Did Not Match

Scale

one approved cloth, three stitching vendors

The challenge

A buyer running a single uniform programme across three regions had it stitched locally, one vendor per region, all cutting the same approved poly-viscose suiting. Garments arriving from the three units did not match. Trousers from one city came back shorter in the finished inseam after the first few washes, a second unit's garments read very slightly different in colour when hung beside the first, and the third unit's consumption per garment ran higher than the other two with no obvious reason. The buyer opened it as a fabric complaint, which is where these almost always start, because the cloth is the one thing all three units have in common and therefore looks like the variable.

Our approach

• We asked for one thing before anything else: which roll each unit had cut, by roll number. That reframed the problem immediately. The three units had not been cutting from one pool of rolls, and the colour difference tracked a lot boundary, so it was a dye-lot question rather than a dyeing fault. A programme split across sites needs the rolls allocated deliberately, with each site's rolls drawn from the same lot where the garments will be worn together, rather than whatever arrived on that site's pallet.
• The shrinkage difference was not shrinkage at all, it was allowance. Each unit had been applying its own habit: one cut with no allowance because the cloth is described as pre-shrunk, one carried a general allowance it applied to every fabric it handled, and one had measured the actual residual shrinkage on a test cutting. Three different allowances on the same cloth produce three different finished garments even when the fabric behaves identically at all three. We gave the buyer a measured residual shrinkage figure for the construction and asked all three units to work to it rather than to their own defaults.
• The consumption gap turned out to be width and marker. The units were working to different assumptions about usable width, and the one running high was laying its marker for a narrower cutable width than the cloth actually gave, then treating the difference as wastage. Finished width in centimetres, and usable width after selvedge, are properties of the roll and belong on the specification sheet rather than in each cutting room's memory.
• So the fix was a single sheet, issued by the buyer to all three units and matched by us at despatch: construction and composition, finished and usable width in centimetres, the measured residual shrinkage and the allowance to apply, the reference cutting for shade, and the roll allocation per site. Nothing in it was new information. It had simply never been written in one place, which is what allowed each unit to fill the gaps with its own practice.
• For the reorder we changed the despatch as well as the sheet. Rolls now go out allocated by site from the same lot, labelled with the lot on the outside of the wrapper, and the buyer keeps a reference cutting per site rather than one for the programme. When a unit queries a shade now it queries against the cutting in its own hand, and the answer takes a day rather than a round trip through the buyer's head office.

<a href="https://www.bennycotts.com/case-studies/one-program-three-stitching-units-three-cities">One Approved Cloth, Three Stitching Units, Three Cities: Why the Garments Still Did Not Match</a>, Benny Cotts, 2026

Updated 5 September 2026 · Benny Cotts, Bhilwara