Services

Design

In the fast-paced industry of fashion, it is important to ensure you kept up-to-date with the latest in design and trends.

We can provide you with design guidance across a range of departments and clothing product areas. Whether you require on trend designs for short or longer lead times, or you are designing for a specific market, Inchley patterns and grading services can help you out.

We can carry out intensive design research for garments through to trims and fabrics. Not only can we provide cost effective, commercial deigns, we are also capable of helping you out with any technical requirements your design may need.

First Patterns

This is where it all begins; a first pattern is the paper pattern created to turn a 2D design concept into 3D reality.

At Inchley pattern and grading services, we can create your first pattern from a range of initial concept ideas. These could include, photographs, sketches, spec measurements, existing garments or internet images.

Experienced, and technically minded pattern cutters can use the information you have provided to create the first pattern and construction methods to create a physical sample. Once you have this first pattern you can develop it further into adjusted styles or different sizes.

We can provide you with paper patterns, accompanied with a technical drawing, and we can also provide digital copies, which are compatible with a range of pattern cutting CAD software.

Pattern Amendments

So, you’ve got a first pattern and a fully constructed garment? If it’s perfect first time, then that’s great! (but also, very rare). So what if it needs amending to ensure the fit is right for a particular customer? or there are a few style changes you want to make, add a collar here, remove a sleeve there? then this is something we can do for you.

We have many years’ experience in ‘sealing’ garments. This is the process of using fit comments, comments usually provided by a garment technologist, buyer or designer, to make the appropriate amendments to the pattern to ensure the garment fits adequately or the style is as the customer requests, right up until the stage it is ready for the final garment.

Fortunately, we have the facilities to make these amendments on paper or digitally, which means we can provide a quick, accurate and comprehensive service.

Digital Grading

The days of manual pattern grading are long in the past. Grading can be done so much more accurately and efficiently when using a CAD program. Here, at Inchley pattern and grading services, we use the Vetigraph pattern cutting and grading software to carry out these tasks.

This is a reliable and popular resource for grading patterns, and allows us to provide our customers with digital files of their graded patterns, which are ready to be used on marker making software, or we can simply provide you with a graded nest or each size of the pattern printed separately.

Usually, we would grade our patterns according to the guidance of our customer, as this can often be a unique requirement, depending on the end customer of the manufactured garments. If you are not sure how you want your patterns to be graded, we are more than happy to use our years of experience and knowledge about grading methods to guide you through the best options.

Technical Drawings

As a standard procedure, with each of our patterns we provide a ‘design sheet’, which usually includes a hand drawn image of the garment, as it is supposed to look when made up, a list of pattern pieces included in the style, trims and fabrics used and inspiration images.

These drawings are usually enough to guide the sample machinist on how to sew the garment together. Sometimes, though, a more in depth drawing is required, usually if the garment it complicated, very detailed or is being made off site at a unit you cannot physically attend, usually abroad.

These detailed, technical drawings are usually created on a Cad software, such as Photoshop or Illustrator, which can produce clean drawings which are easy to follow. This technique is also a good way of displaying the technical make up of particular details in a garment, for example a jet pocket on a suit jacket, or a pleat detail on the neckline of a dress.

Costings

This an extremely valuable service, which gives you peace of mind, that you are getting the most value out of your goods. A detailed costing lets you know exactly how much money it will cost to make each garment.

At Inchley pattern and grading services, we use the Vetigraph marker making software to accurately find out the fabric consumption of each garment. This helps the customer work out the cost of the amount of fabric per unit, how much fabric in total they will need to order and whether the style is viable. Once again this is where we can step in and help, if the garment is using too much fabric, or there is too much waste, we can help you come up with solutions to make the style more commercial and cost effective.

The more information you provide us, the more accurate and comprehensive the costing is that we return to you. Providing we know the ratios of your order and the width of your fabric, the fabric consumption costing will be near enough spot on. If we also know the price of the fabric, trims, prints etc., used for each style we can provide you with an end cost, which you can then use to work out your end selling price to your customer and what your profit margins will be.

Production Pattern

So we’ve helped you design your garment, produced the first pattern, amended it until the fit and style is just right, comprehensively costed it, created a digital format of the pattern and graded it, and what you should end up with is a production pattern ready to be cut, made and sent off to the customer. But at this stage it is still so vital that close attention to detail is payed to ensure the garment is completely ready to go into final stage of production.

This includes determining the shrinking of the production fabric and how this will affect the measurements of the finished garment and ensure that the last stage of the pattern works effectively.

We can aid you in ensuring this by providing a ‘final sealer’ process of pre-production, this is basically dotting the I’s and crossing the t’s in garment manufacturing terms.

Technical Packs

The technical requirements of each customer can vary quite significantly, so we are here to help you produce appropriate technical packs for your dockets.

A technical pack would usually include measurement specifications, a record of fit comments and style amendments, technical drawings, photographs, order of make, costing sheet, fabric specifications, graded specifications and any other relevant technical details for you or your customer.

These are also a good resource to send out to factories making your garments, particularly if they are abroad. As they are a go to document for finding out the detailed specifications of the style.

Design/Mood Boards and Trend Packs

These boards can be produced physically, on foam or mount board, and display printed images, sketches, photographs and fabric swatches and trims. These are very popular at buying meetings, and can help show your customer that you are a professional supplier, who can aid them in the design process as well as taking lead from them.

We can also produce these boards digitally, on Photoshop or illustrator, for a clean and quick solution, which can still be printed out or simply shared via email, Dropbox, The Cloud etc.

The same applies for our trend pack service.