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If you design, produce or retail apparel, you will source. Sourcing is the industry term for finding vendors for the items you need. Whether you need textiles, buttons, production, IT services, machinery, display fixtures, shipping, or garments themselves, you will do well to study the market and search for the best companies. They will become your “partners” of a sort, and they will help you to achieve your goals or fail to achieve those goals.
This blog is a source in one sense. It is a source to other sources. Remember that here at 1on1, it is not the newness of the post but the relevance of the information that makes the site worth exploring and revisiting. Further, this blog is just one tiny spec in a universe of knowledge about the apparel supply chain.
Fashiondex.com is a good place to get some sourcing direction started. It is also a site that carries a super selection of apparel industry related books. Anyone interested in product development and apparel production will be well served by the site. There is a link in the LinksList under both Books on Fashion and Sourcing.
We already use many of the books available at Fashiondex.com and Fairchild, etc. And new books are coming out all of the time. One that looks interesting is The Vendor Compliance Handbook. We want to get a look at this book to see if it offers viewpoints we have not yet studied. Apparel Design and Production Handbook/A Technical Reference offers standard measurements and grading charts. Our design students learn how to develop their own grade rules but it is great to have options
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