What is Stickering in Garment Industry?

In the fabric cutting room, after cutting the garment panels, number marking is done to each layers and each garment component. The method used to stick a numbering sticker on the garment cut panels is known as stickering.

This stickering process is very common in the mass garment manufacturing industry. The stickers attached to the panels help other departments to identify the order number, style number, size, fabric lot number of the garment from the serial number printed on the sticker.

Stickering in garment industry

Layer stickering is done after cutting the fabric layer and sorting the layers. This process is done prior to bundling process.

A hand labelling machine is used for attaching this gum sticker to the fabric panels. The stickering machine prints a pre-designed number on the paper sticker and stick on the fabric (garment parts).

Application of layer stickering

As per industry experts, the main reason of following stickering (ply numbering) process is to avoid mixing of different garment component from different fabric layers in the stitching process. And it is true. If there is shade variation between fabric layers and an operator picks sleeve components from a different layer and the front and back panels from another layer, there is chance of getting shade variation in the stitched garment. Which may cause quality failure.

After the garment stitching, to attach a size label to a garment, the operator refers to the sticker.  This helps an operator avoiding in attaching the wrong size label to a garment.

The line feeder and line supervisor, refer to these small stickers for loading a specific size to a line and understanding size-wise WIP moving in a production line.   

Learn more about sticker process on this article.

For the stickering process, one needs number sticker rolls and a label stickering machine. The cutting department in a garment factory takes care of the stickering of the garment panel. 

Layer numbering stickers (image source: indiamart.com)


Related post: Cutting room overview – full process sequence of garment cutting department.

Prasanta Sarkar

Prasanta Sarkar is a textile engineer and a postgraduate in fashion technology from NIFT, New Delhi, India. He has authored 6 books in the field of garment manufacturing technology, garment business setup, and industrial engineering. He loves writing how-to guide articles in the fashion industry niche. He has been working in the apparel manufacturing industry since 2006. He has visited garment factories in many countries and implemented process improvement projects in numerous garment units in different continents including Asia, Europe, and South Africa. He is the founder and editor of the Online Clothing Study Blog.

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