Packaging

Packaging is the last thing made and the first thing the customer handles, and it sits across two very different sets of requirements: the legal and the commercial. The legal side is labelling — fibre content, care instructions, country of origin and, increasingly, market-specific obligations that differ between the US, the EU and the UK. The commercial side is how the garment is folded, bagged, ticketed and boxed for the channel it is sold through.

The two meet in the packing specification. A style can be folded and polybagged flat, hung, tissue-wrapped, boxed as a gift unit, or prepared for e-commerce with a size sticker and a returns label already inside. Each option has a cost and a lead-time implication, and the choice is usually driven by the retail channel rather than by preference: what a boutique needs and what a marketplace fulfilment centre will accept are not the same.

Labelling is where the avoidable problems live, because a label error is not a quality defect a customer forgives — it is a compliance problem that can stop goods at the border or trigger a recall. The fibre and care content has to match the garment actually produced, in the market actually being sold into, which means the label often cannot be printed until the fabric and the trims are final.

Start from packaging and labelling for the service view. The guides below cover the labelling requirements by market and the packing decisions by channel.