Importance of Quality Control in Garment Manufacturing

The garment industry has a complex supply chain where garment makers source materials, stitch garments and sell goods to retailers. Through buyers and retailers quality garments reach to end user located all over the world. No wearers will buy a garment with poor quality and visible defects. So buyers and retailer knowingly do not purchase a product that does not meet the quality requirement. Quality conscious buyers have a strong quality inspection system in place to avoid purchasing of defective goods.



There is no way garment manufacturers can ignore producing quality products. Quality comes first to most of the manufacturer supplying garments across the countries.

The question is "what is the importance of Quality Control?"

This article is written on importance of quality control garment manufacturers point of view. Quality must be controlled during processing whether it is done by the operators, supervisors, pressman, garment packers or one employs a checker or inspector. In case quality of the product and processes is not being controlled from beginning to end it will cause followings:

• High alteration and rejection of garments 
• Requirement of extra manpower for checking of goods and repair work 
• Factory may loose customers (buyers) as well as Brand Value 
• Low motivated employees 
• Need to work for extra hours 
• Delay in production completion 
• Ultimately production cost will increase if one ignores quality control area in manufacturing stage 

I saw buyers to reject packed shipments when they found shade variation in garments, wrong size ratio in packed shipment and faulty garment patterns. Can you imagine how small size garment exporters can manage their businesses when shipments get rejected by buyers due to quality issue? Most of the reasons can be cured at initial stages if the problem was noticed and action had been taken. Managers used to say that garments are soft goods. Hence it is not possible to produce 100% goods fault free to justify their failure to make quality goods. Ignoring of quality production results negative impact on the business growth for long term.

If you have a quality control team, the role of the quality is likely -

• To check raw materials and confirm for use in cutting, sewing processes. 
• Check cutting quality, patterns, cut parts. 
• Check the sewing process, do 100% inspection of stitched pieces and move quality garment for finishing. 
• Checks garments after washing and finishing stage up to packing of goods. 
• All the above checks are necessary to avoid failure of final inspection, rejection of shipments and control over manufacturing cost. 
• It is to be noted that the importance of controlling garment quality may vary for the other part of the supply chain.