Custom clothing glossary

3D puff embroidery lays a sheet of foam under the stitching so the thread wraps over it and the design stands two to three millimetres off the…

Appliqué lays a piece of fabric — felt, twill, or a contrasting knit — onto the garment in the shape of your design and stitches it down with an…

Chenille is embroidery worked in looped yarn that stands up as a soft, fuzzy pile — the texture of a classic varsity letter. It is usually made as a…

Colour separation splits your artwork into one layer per ink colour — each layer becomes its own screen and its own pass on the press. A three-colour…

Discharge printing uses an ink that bleaches the garment's own dye out of the fabric where the design sits, then replaces it with pigment. Because…

DTF — direct-to-film — prints your artwork onto a clear film with a white backing layer, coats it with adhesive powder, and heat-presses it onto the…

DTG — direct-to-garment — prints water-based ink directly into the fabric with a large inkjet printer. The ink sits in the fibre rather than on it,…

Embroidery stitches your artwork into the garment with thread, from a digitised file that tells the machine where every stitch goes. Priced by the…

A halftone breaks a continuous tone — a gradient, a shadow, a photograph — into dots of varying size so that one ink colour can appear lighter or…

Hybrid printing screen prints a white underbase onto the garment, then prints full-colour artwork over it with a DTG head. Each method does the job…

Plastisol is the standard screen-printing ink: a PVC-based ink that sits on the fabric surface and cures under heat into a durable, opaque film. It…

Pre-treatment is a liquid sprayed onto the garment before DTG printing. On dark garments it lets the white underbase sit on top of the fibre instead…

Puff print is a plastisol screen-printing ink mixed with a blowing agent. Printed like any screen print, it expands in the curing tunnel and rises…

Screen printing pushes ink through a fine mesh screen stencilled with your artwork, one screen and one pass per colour. Setup is per colour; once the…

Sublimation prints dye onto transfer paper, then presses it against polyester at around 200°C, where the dye turns to gas and bonds inside the fibre.…

An underbase is a layer of white ink laid down before the colours so that the design stays bright and opaque on a dark garment instead of being…

Water-based ink carries its pigment in water rather than PVC, so it soaks into cotton fibre instead of sitting on top. The print is soft, breathable…

Brushed-back describes a fleece whose inner face has been passed over rotating wire brushes to raise the fibres into a soft, fluffy, insulating nap.…

Combed cotton has been passed through fine combs before spinning to remove short fibres and any remaining debris, leaving only the long, straight…

Cotton is the natural fibre behind tees, hoodies, polos and most everyday garments — soft, breathable, absorbent, and the fibre DTG and discharge…

Fleece, in knitwear, is a fabric with a smooth knitted face and a back that has been brushed to raise a soft, insulating nap. It is the fabric of…

French terry has the smooth face of a sweatshirt fabric but an unbrushed back of small yarn loops, which makes it lighter, more breathable and less…

GSM is grams per square metre — how much a square metre of the fabric weighs. It is the single number that predicts most about how a garment feels:…

Interlock is a double-knit fabric — two layers of jersey knitted together so both faces are smooth. It is heavier, more stable and less prone to…

Jersey is the single-knit fabric of the t-shirt: a smooth face, a slightly looped back, stretch across the width and a tendency to curl at the cut…

Piqué is a knit with a raised, textured surface — a fine waffle or honeycomb pattern — that gives the classic polo shirt its look and feel. It is…

Poly-cotton is a blend of polyester and cotton — 65/35 and 80/20 are the common ratios — that combines polyester's shrink resistance, fast drying and…

Polyester is a synthetic fibre that wicks moisture, dries quickly, resists shrinking and holds colour through hot washing. It is the fibre of…

Pre-shrunk — or compacted — fabric has been mechanically shrunk before the garment is cut, so the finished piece shrinks far less in the customer's…

Ring-spun cotton is yarn made by continuously twisting and thinning the cotton fibres into a fine, strong, smooth thread. Compared with open-end…

Twill is a woven fabric with a visible diagonal rib, made by passing the weft over two or more warp threads in a stepped pattern. It is durable,…

A bar tack is a short, dense block of zigzag stitching — about a centimetre — sewn over a point that takes strain: the corners of a kangaroo pocket,…

A coverstitch is the pair of parallel stitch lines you see on the outside of a t-shirt hem, cuff or neckband, with a looped thread covering the raw…

Cut and sew means the garment is made from fabric — cut to a pattern and sewn — rather than bought as a finished blank and decorated. It is what a…

A flatlock seam joins two pieces edge to edge with a flat, ladder-like stitch so there is no ridge on the inside. It is used where the seam sits…

A marker is the plan for laying out every pattern piece — for every size in the order — across the width of the fabric so that the least cloth is…

An overlock — or serge — is a stitch that joins two pieces and wraps the raw edge in looped thread in a single pass, trimming as it goes. It…

A pattern is the set of flat shaped pieces a garment is cut from — front, back, sleeves, hood, pocket, cuff and so on — drafted for the base size and…

Size grading is the process of scaling a base pattern — usually the medium — up and down to every other size by set increments for each measurement:…

A structured cap has a layer of buckram — a stiff interfacing — fused inside the front two panels so the crown stands up and holds its shape empty.…

A bill of materials — BOM — is the list of everything a garment is made of: body fabric with composition and weight, rib, thread, zips, drawcords,…

A blank is a finished, undecorated garment — a plain tee, hoodie or cap — ready to be printed or embroidered. Stock blanks come from a fixed…

A colourway is one complete colour combination of a style: the body colour, the rib, the thread, the print colours and the label, taken together. A…

Digitising converts your artwork into a stitch file — the instructions an embroidery machine follows for every stitch: its position, direction,…

Garment dyeing sews the garment first, in undyed fabric, and dyes the finished piece afterwards in a batch. It produces the soft, washed, slightly…

A lab dip is a small piece of the actual fabric dyed to your Pantone reference before any bulk dyeing, sent for approval. It is how a custom colour…

Lead time is the time from approved sample and artwork to the order leaving the factory — production only, not shipping. Ours is 7–10 days for…

MOQ — minimum order quantity — is the smallest run a factory will produce for one style. It exists because every order carries fixed costs — screens,…

OEM — original equipment manufacturer — is the term the wider manufacturing world uses for a factory that produces a product to a customer's complete…

Pantone TCX is the Pantone system for textiles: colours defined on dyed cotton swatches rather than printed paper, so they represent what a fabric…

A pre-production sample — PPS — is one complete garment made to the final specification on the same line, from the same fabric, with the real…

Private label means the garment is made for your brand to your specification — your fit, your fabric, your colour, your trims — and sold only under…

Stitch count is the number of stitches the machine makes to embroider a design — set by the design's size, its density, and how much of it is filled.…

A stitch-out is a test embroidery of your digitised logo on the actual garment fabric, made before bulk so you can approve the thread colours, the…

A strike-off is a single test print of your design on the real garment or fabric, produced before bulk so you can approve the colour, the placement,…

A tech pack — technical package — is the document that specifies one garment completely: flat sketches, bill of materials, measurements per size with…

A white-label garment is one the factory already makes — its own blank, pattern and fabric — supplied with your woven label sewn in and your…

A care label is the small printed label — usually satin or taffeta — sewn into the side seam that states the fibre composition, the washing and care…

An export carton is the corrugated box — usually 5-ply for strength — that finished garments ship in, packed by size and style, sealed, and marked on…

A hangtag is the card tag attached to the outside of a garment with a string, plastic swift tag or safety pin, carrying the brand, a price, a size, a…

A polybag is the individual clear plastic bag each finished garment is folded and sealed into before cartoning. It protects the garment in transit,…

A woven label is a brand label made by weaving the design in thread on a narrow loom, rather than printing it, then cut, folded and sewn into the…

Country of origin is the country where the garment was substantially made — for a cut-and-sew garment, where it was cut and sewn. It determines the…

Import duty is the tax a destination country charges on goods entering it, as a percentage of their value. For garments made in Pakistan it varies…

Incoterms are the standard trade terms that say who pays for and is responsible for a shipment at each stage — from the factory door to your door.…