How Much Time To Budget for your First Production Run?

Before moving forward, your production checklist should have all of it's marks to ensure that you're going to meet your production time goals. Knowing what roadblocks and time delays could cause for delays need to be known ahead of time so you're prepared. Here's what you need to know:

First run: Plan for 6 months
A million things can go wrong in production, and like Murphy's Law, what can go wrong, will go wrong. If you plan for mistakes and delays in advance you can avoid the stress of delays and the embarrassment of missed sales deadlines. By planning for 4-6 months of product development and production you can order fabrics, perfect product development, and go back and forth a few times on sampling to finally achieve the final production ready sample. With that being said, your factory may meet production in 3-4 months but it's better to over plan when it's your first try.  

Production Plan Factors:

• Map your process: Your factory will help you determine the steps, but having a strong understanding of the production process will help you stay on track and on time. Our Production Pro course will teach you this process and our THR3EFOLD Platform includes a Production Tracker to keep you notified of deadlines and important To Do items.
• Risk factors: Fabric is scratchy or pulls easily. Your favorite trimming is out of stock. It takes 3x as long to get the garment worker team training on your product than you expected.There's always a chance of production roadblocks, so it's important to plan for any potential problems. 
• Material ordering: Have a few materials selected in case minimums, availability, or quality become an issue. 
• Consider change: Keeping an open mind can help production run smoothly. Your dream fabric may have astronomical minimum order requirements (very common). You may have preferred to find an American factory but your perfect match may be waiting for you in Guatemala or India and they can meet all your requirements and beat the price. At the end of the day you are trying to solve a problem for your customer and if they cannot afford to buy it, then you haven't completed your mission. Be open.

Each production run gets a little easier and you get a little better. You'll find ways to make things easier on yourself, and your factory as time goes on so it's important to note that things might not be perfect the first time around. Our platform offers a cloud-based process that gives you a birds eye view of you production and easy access to communication with you factory, keeping everything in one place. Join here today!

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