The tour of a garment factory is the part of choosing a partner that everyone gets right. The lighting, the machines and the state of the floor are the easy signals, and they are also the signals any factory that hosts buyer visits will have prepared. The harder signals, the ones that predict whether the relationship survives three seasons, are not on the tour.
How long the line supervisors have been there is one. If the supervisors changed in the last year, the floor has lost its memory of what works and what fails on each machine. That knowledge sits with the people rather than in a folder of procedures. A factory where supervisors have been in place for years is a different counterparty from one with high turnover, whatever the floor looks like on the day you visit.
Capacity arithmetic is another. Most factories quote capacity as though you were their only customer. What matters is the capacity they actually have spare, given everything else they have already promised. Asking for last quarter's real output by line, alongside their current commitments, gives you that number. If a factory cannot or will not put that in writing, it is not a question of trust, and you should not commit.
The third check is what happened after things went wrong. Every factory has quality failures. What separates them is whether they can show you, for the last year, what failed, what they found when they looked into it, and what changed afterwards. A factory that answers with a record has a working quality discipline. A factory that says it does not usually have problems has told you that it does not keep one.
A fourth, less obvious check is how the factory handles a small order. Ask for something modest first. How a supplier treats an order that is not commercially important to them is the best available guide to how they will treat you in a season when someone larger is pushing for the same line.
We buy cloth rather than finished garments, from independent mills in India, Indonesia, Japan and Malaysia, and we own no production of our own. The checks above are the ones our desk applies before a first order and repeats afterwards, because a supplier relationship is only as good as the last season it survived. Our textile desk page sets out how the work runs.
One more thing, which is rarely written down. Visit in the busy season rather than the quiet one. A factory in February tells you very little about the same factory in the weeks before a peak, and the way a floor behaves under pressure is the only version of it that matters to your delivery date.
