After thirty years as a business, we’ve seen the same mistakes made over and over. Here are the five that come up most often, and why they’re almost always avoidable.
1. Treating grading as an afterthought
By the time most brands think seriously about grading, they’ve already made decisions that make the process harder than it needs to be. The pattern is what it is. The factory is booked. The timeline is tight.
Grading works best when it’s considered from the beginning, not bolted on at the end. The earlier it’s part of the conversation, the better the outcome.
2. Sampling one size and assuming the rest will follow
A size 10 that fits perfectly tells you almost nothing about how a size 16 will perform. Proportions shift. Fit changes. What works at one end of the size range can completely fall apart at the other.
Every size in a range needs to be validated before it goes into production. Not assumed.
3. Changing suppliers without updating specs
Small changes accumulate quietly. A different factory interprets measurements slightly differently. A new supplier works from an older version of the pattern. Nobody flags it at the time.
Eventually a size 12 in one collection is no longer the same size 12 in another. Customers notice. Trust erodes. And tracing it back to the source takes time nobody has.
4. Skipping fit testing to save time
It never actually saves time. It just moves the problem further down the line where it costs more to fix. Fit issues found during testing are cheap. Fit issues found after production are expensive. Fit issues found by customers are the most costly of all.
5. Assuming the factory will sort it out
They won’t. Factories reproduce what they’re given. If the pattern is wrong, the garment is wrong. The technical stage is where problems get fixed. Not the production floor.
So what’s the fix?
None of these mistakes are difficult to avoid. They just require the technical side to be part of the conversation earlier than most brands are used to. Bring grading in before the pattern is finalised. Test across the full size range before production begins. Document everything. Work with partners who ask the right questions. It’s not complicated. It just has to be intentional.