Most founders think the tech pack is the document that gets priced. It isn’t. The tech pack tells the factory how to build the garment.
The bill of materials tells the factory what goes into it, and that list is what a costing team actually adds up.
Every line on your BOM is a line on your quote. Miss a component, and you haven’t saved money.
You’ve just moved the cost to a later, worse moment: a revised quote after sampling, a chargeback at a retailer, or a stalled shipment at a port.
This guide walks the whole thing. Short sections. Tickable checklists under each. By the end you’ll have a complete component list, know how to spec each line, and have a template ready to fill.
A bill of materials is a structured list of every physical component that goes into, onto, or around a finished garment, with a spec and a quantity for each.
Fabric. Thread. Labels. The poly bag. The hangtag string. All of it.
Think of it as the recipe’s ingredient list.
The tech pack is the method, construction, measurements, stitch types, and tolerances.
The BOM is the shopping list the factory buys against and the costing team prices.
When a factory prices your garment, it doesn’t guess from a picture. A costing team works line by line down the BOM:
Fabric per meter or kilo. Zippers per piece. Labels per thousand.
How much of that material one garment uses is the number most founders leave blank.
Summed up on the sheet, plus labor and overhead, that’s your cost.
So a BOM with missing lines produces a quote that looks cheaper until the missing components resurface.
A founder who forgets to list interlining, woven labels, and a printed poly bag can be looking at a real cost several percentage points above the number they budgeted around.
On a tight streetwear margin, that gap is the difference between a healthy drop and a break-even one.
The Consumption Column. The single column that separates a real BOM from a parts list. A list of components tells the factory what to buy. The consumption figure next to each tells them how much and only then can anyone put a price on it. If you take one habit from this guide: never send a component list without a consumption estimate beside every line, even a rough one. It forces the conversation that surfaces hidden cost early.
This is also why comparing two quotes is only meaningful when both were priced off the same complete BOM. A quote missing three components isn’t cheaper — it’s incomplete. If you’re weighing suppliers, line the BOMs up before you line the prices up. See how to compare quotes on a like-for-like basis and how unit costing is built up.
Founders don’t forget fabric. They forget the components further from the garment’s surface, the ones they never see as a shopper because they’re stripped away before wear.
So walk the garment from the inside out, in four rings. Finish a ring before moving to the next. Nothing gets skipped.
Rings 1 and 2 are the components founders remember. Rings 3 and 4 are where the surprises live labels have compliance rules, and packaging is a real per-unit cost that quietly stacks up. The rest of this guide is one ring at a time.
The body is every fabric the garment is built from. Not just the main one. A hoodie has a face fabric, often a rib for cuffs and hem, sometimes a lining in the hood, and frequently a fusible interlining in a placket or collar. Each is a separate line.
Every distinct fabric on the outside. A color-blocked piece can have three or four.
Cuffs, waistband, and collar. Often a different composition and GSM than the body.
Jackets, hoods, some shorts. A cost line founders skip on “simple” garments that aren’t.
The stiffener behind plackets, collars, and waistbands. Invisible, but bought and cut per garment.
Pocket bags are usually a cheaper secondary fabric still in line.
Naming the fabric isn’t enough. A costing team can’t price “cotton fleece.” They can price a fabric with a full spec:
e.g., 80% cotton / 20% polyester. Drives price and behavior.
Grams per square meter. The single biggest fabric cost lever.
French terry, fleece, jersey, twill, ripstop.
Usable width affects consumption and therefore cost.
Pantone TCX or a physical lab dip reference, not “black.”
Enzyme wash, brushed, peached, and anti-pill are priced separately.
GSM alone can swing a garment’s fabric cost meaningfully; a heavier fleece uses more material per piece and costs more per meter. If you’re not fluent in weight-to-feel yet, get fluent before you lock a bill of materials. Read the fabric and GSM guide to spec weights with confidence.
The build ring is everything that physically holds the garment together or makes it function. These are cheap per unit and easy to forget precisely because they’re small, but a garment can carry a dozen of them, and they add up.
Composition, ticket number, color. Multiple colors mean multiple lines.
Waistbands and cuffs. Spec width and type (woven, knitted, braided).
Flat or round, width, length, tipped or plain ends.
The little clips on a hood cord. Separate line from the cord.
Type (coil, metal, invisible), size (#3, #5), length, color, puller style, and brand.
Material, size, finish, and the tooling die if custom.
Size, finish, quantity per garment.
Neck tape, seam binding, and twill tape. Width and composition.
Stabilizes shoulder and neckline seams. Easy to miss.
Two habits keep this ring honest. First, count quantities per garment: a jacket with two pockets, a main zip, and a chin guard has four zip pulls, not one. Second, list every distinct color separately. Black thread and white topstitch thread on the same garment are two lines.
This is the ring that carries legal weight. Labels aren’t just branding; several are required by law in the markets you sell into, and getting them wrong causes rejected shipments and retailer chargebacks. So this ring is both a cost list and a compliance list.
Woven or printed, at the neck or waist. Size, placement, and attachment method.
The legally required disclosure label. Often printed satin, heat-transfer, or woven.
Separate or combined with the main label.
Chest, sleeve, back pocket. Each placement is a line.
The small folded tab on a side seam or pocket.
The cardboard swing tag. Stock, print, size, finish.
A string, safety pin, plastic loop, or barbell tag is a separate component from the tag itself.
For most apparel sold in the United States, federal law requires the garment to carry a permanently attached label disclosing fiber content, country of origin, and the identity of the manufacturer or dealer (a company name or an FTC-issued RN number), plus care instructions under the Care Labeling Rule.
These rules come from the Textile Fiber Products Identification Act and the FTC’s Care Labeling Rule, and they’re enforced. The FTC treats each mislabeled garment as a separate violation, so an error multiplies across a whole run. A few specifics that trip founders up:
Brand names aren’t allowed as the primary identifier, such as “spandex” or “elastane,” not “Lycra,” or “lyocell,” not “Tencel.” Fibers listed in descending order by weight.
A garment with a distinct shell and lining needs each disclosed separately: “Shell: 100% nylon. Lining: 100% Polyester.”
“Made in Pakistan” on the front of the label.
A hangtag doesn’t count; the care label has to survive the garment’s life. ISO 3758 care symbols are the international standard.
You can add other languages, but the English disclosure can’t be substituted.
Selling into the EU or UK changes the rules. Fiber-composition labeling is mandatory there too, but the permitted terms, care-symbol norms, and language requirements per market differ from the US. Gibbenclothing’s GSP+ position gives Pakistan preferential duty into the EU and UK on most cotton apparel, which makes those markets attractive, so get the labeling right for them specifically. Verify current requirements with your broker before you finalize label copy.
The outermost ring is everything the garment ships inside. None of it is worn; all of it is bought, per unit, and priced. This is the ring founders forget most completely because a shopper never sees it as a “component.” Your costing team absolutely does.
Individual garment bag. Size, thickness (micron/gauge), print, resealable or not, suffocation warning.
On the poly bag. Often a retailer requirement; specify the format.
Common on premium pieces. Plain or printed.
Folded shirts, structured pieces. Butterfly clips, backboards, collar bands, pins.
Price tickets, RFID tags, promotional inserts, anything added at the packing table.
Export carton. Size, ply, print, and the pack ratio (how many pieces per carton).
Shipping marks and content labels on the outside of the box.
Silica packs for humidity in transit, tissue fill. Small, but a line.
Packaging is where a “cheap” quote and a “complete” quote diverge quietly.
A printed poly bag, a woven hangtag on a cord, and a branded master carton together can add real money per unit that a bare quote never mentioned.
List them, and the comparison stays honest.
You now have every component across four rings. A complete list is half a BOM. The other half is the detail that lets someone price and buy against it: specs, placements, quantities, and consumption.
A component with no spec is a question, not an instruction. Aim for every line to answer the following: What is it? Exactly which one? Where does it go? How many? How much material?
“Woven label center back neck,” not just “label.”
Composition, size, color, finish, or a supplier part number.
Which components change per colorway and which stay constant?
4 eyelets, 2 drawcords, 1 main zip. Count them.
1.6 m fabric, 0.4 m elastic, and 1 pc. zipper. The column that makes it priceable.
Consumption is how much of a material one finished garment uses, including a realistic allowance for wastage in cutting.
It’s the number a founder is least equipped to fill and most tempted to skip, and skipping it is exactly why quotes come back with surprises.
You don’t have to calculate it perfectly.
The factory will confirm real consumption after the marker is made (the cutting layout that determines fabric yield).
But putting a rough figure on every line does two things: it forces you to notice components you’d otherwise leave uncounted, and it lets you sanity-check the quote against your own estimate instead of accepting a number blind.
The Consumption Column, again. This is the habit worth building. Even a placeholder consumption figure per line turns a passive parts list into an active costing tool. Blank consumption is where hidden costs hide. Filling it roughly is fine, and the surprises surface now, on your sheet, instead of later, in a revised quote.
The BOM and the tech pack describe the same garment from two angles.
When they disagree, the factory has to guess which one to trust, and a guess on the floor is a defect waiting to happen.
The CLTrust setup is a tech pack with the BOM built in as a dedicated page or tab, so a change in one place updates the other.
If you keep them as separate files, you take on the job of keeping them matched. Either works, but decide and be disciplined.
V1, V2, V3 with a date. The factory should always know which version is live.
One line per change: what changed, when, why. Saves a hundred emails.
Sampling reveals components you missed. Add them to the BOM immediately, not “later.”
If the tech pack calls it a “#5 coil zip,” the BOM says “#5 coil zip” not “main zipper.”
A BOM that lists a component the tech pack doesn’t place, or a tech pack that shows a trim the BOM never priced, produces exactly the surprise this whole guide is built to prevent.
The factory either pauses to ask (delay) or proceeds on an assumption (defect).
Both cost more than the two minutes it takes to keep the documents matched.
The BOM lives inside your broader tech-pack discipline.
If you haven’t built the tech pack itself yet or want the field-by-field breakdown of everything that sits alongside the BOM, start there and slot the BOM in as you go.
How to write a tech pack covers the build; the field-by-field anatomy guide covers what every field means and what breaks when it’s blank.
Here’s the structure to build in a spreadsheet. One row per component. Group the rows by ring so nothing gets skipped. Add a colorway block if you run more than one color.
| Ring | Component & placement | Spec/reference | Colour | Qty / gmt | Consumption | Supplier |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Body | Face fabric — body | [comp / GSM/knit/width] | [Pantone] | 1 | [m / kg] | [ ] |
| 1 Body | Rib cuffs & hem | [comp / GSM] | [Pantone] | 1 | [m / kg] | [ ] |
| 1 Body | Interlining — placket | [fusible type/weight] | — | 1 | [m] | [ ] |
| 2 Build | Sewing thread—main | [comp/ticket] | [to match] | — | [cones] | [ ] |
| 2 Build | Zipper — main | [#5 coil/length/brand] | [colour] | 1 | 1 pc | [ ] |
| 2 Build | Drawcord + stoppers | [flat/round/width] | [colour] | 1 + 2 | [m + pcs] | [ ] |
| 3 Brands | Main label — CB neck | [woven / size] | [colours] | 1 | 1 pc | [ ] |
| 3 Brands | Care + content label | [printed satin/content copy] | — | 1 | 1 pc | [ ] |
| 3 Brands | Hangtag + pin | [stock/print/pin type] | [colours] | 1 + 1 | 1 set | [ ] |
| 4 Box | Poly bag | [size/micron/print] | — | 1 | 1 pc | [ ] |
| 4 Box | Size/barcode sticker | [format] | — | 1 | 1 pc | [ ] |
| 4 Box | Master carton | [size/ply/pack ratio] | — | [1/ratio] | [fraction] | [ ] |
The Gibbenclothing BOM template has one row per component, grouped by ring.
Body, Build, Brand, Box. Don’t jump around; finish each ring.
A blank is a question the factory will have to ask.
Rough is fine. Blank isn’t.
Same version number, same garment, one source of truth.
The tech pack tells the factory how to build the garment construction, measurements, stitch types, tolerances. The BOM lists what goes into it every fabric, trim, label, and packaging component, with a spec and quantity for each. The tech pack is the method; the BOM is the ingredient list. Your quote is built primarily from the BOM.
Yes. Poly bags, hangtags, stickers, and master cartons are all bought per unit and priced by the factory. Leaving them off doesn’t make them free; it just means they appear later as a cost you didn’t budget for. Packaging is the “box” ring, and it’s the one founders forget most completely.
It’s a tie between interlining (the invisible fusible behind plackets and collars) and packaging components (the poly bag and hangtag string). Both are cheap, both are bought per garment, and both are invisible to a shopper which is exactly why they get skipped. The Four Rings model exists to catch them.
Consumption is how much of a material one finished garment uses, including cutting wastage. It’s the column that lets a costing team put a price on each line. Without it, a BOM is just a shopping list. You don’t have to calculate it perfectly; the factory confirms it after the cutting marker is made, but a rough figure on every line surfaces hidden cost early.
For most apparel sold in the US, federal law requires fiber content (generic names, in order by weight), country of origin, the manufacturer or dealer identity (name or FTC-issued RN), and permanent care instructions. The EU and UK have their own fibre-composition rules. Confirm current requirements for each market you sell into with a customs broker before finalizing label copy. The rules are enforced, and each mislabeled garment counts as a separate violation.
Either works, but the cleanest setup is one source of truth, a BOM tab or page inside the tech pack, so a change updates in one place. If you keep them separate, you’re responsible for keeping them matched: the same version number and the same component names, reconciled after every sample round.