Help us find a good shirt manufacturer!

[Bureaucrat]

A few of us are on the verge of starting our own company. I know that there are lots of affiliates on this site that are doing something similar to what we are planing and therefore in the interest of menswear would want to give us a few tips and a nodge in the right direction. I'm not asking for any "secrets" or complete business models, just sound advice.

We are about to start a company that offers shirts of decent quality for a decent price. We are not trying to offer the best shirt out there, rivaling Kiton, Finamore etc. Think of basic shirts (to begin with), blue and with oxford OCBDs, maybe one or two designs that are more formal. Good construction, decent cloth and at an affordable price point (~50€).

I'll get to the point. How is one to go about finding a manufacturer? There seems to loads and it's quite frankly abit overwhelming. I know that we're staying away from Italy, just not enough "bang for the buck". We have discussed choosing a reliable manufacturer from Japan, Romania, Estonia, Macedonia etc. Not to forget good old China and India. Because of our limited resources, we aren't able to travel to a country, which would be the ideal thing to do.

If the projects gets a roll on we are more than willing to ship out free shirts for a review to members that helped us in our time of need!

 

[thesftailor]

Don't under-estimate inter-personal relationships and quality control in countries you're targeting to manufacture your shirts. From our experience, invest in at least one shareholder travelling to meet with factory owners / management. You really want to establish a comfortable level of trust as well as your expectations (and consequences for failing to meet those standards). Being on the ground helps you to think through logistics as well. No operations work as smoothly as we want... and that was leaving room for error and delays.

 

[Bureaucrat]

Thanks,

we are thinking of doing a trip atm, meeting with a few different manufacturers should prove to be fruitful. The initial problem still remains, how do we list out the good manufacturers from the really bad ones? If we were to travel to, let's say China, there's countless of manufacturers that are great and likewise the same amount that produces absolute crap. How did ones on SF list these out?

On another note, is there a good site to browse for manufacturers?