Folding, bagging and identifying the individual garment

Garments typically leave a factory folded, bagged and stickered, and specifications rarely say how. The default is whatever the packing team does for that garment type, which is usually sensible and is nonetheless somebody else's decision.

Hanger or flat

The first decision is whether the goods are folded at all. Garments shipped on hangers arrive ready to go straight onto a rail, which suits some retail operations and some product types, particularly structured outerwear and tailoring where fold creases are a problem.

It is also a more involved shipment. The hanger becomes a specified component with its own model, size, hook orientation and sometimes branding or a size indicator; the goods take considerably more volume; and the receiving operation has to be set up for them. None of that is a reason against it, but all of it belongs in the specification rather than being discovered at booking.

Where garments do ship on hangers, the hanger specification comes from the buyer. Some retail programmes standardise on particular hanger systems, and those are that programme's requirement rather than an industry standard.

Specifying a fold

Fold matters for three reasons that have nothing to do with aesthetics: it determines the folded footprint, which determines the bag and therefore the carton; it determines what is visible through the bag; and it determines where the creases fall.

Illustrative only. Fold method and dimensions are specified per product; there is no standard fold, and the right one depends on the garment and where it is going.

A buyer who needs a consistent folded footprint, usually because the goods have to fit a fixture or a standard bag, should say so in measurable terms rather than describing the fold in words.

That last point is worth flagging early rather than late. A print or an embroidery placed across a natural fold line will be creased through it every time, and the fold may need designing around the artwork. Where a placement is already fixed, artwork placement sets out how it was specified and what moving it would involve.

Choosing the bag

An individual bag does unglamorous work: it keeps the garment clean through handling and transit, keeps sizes separated so a warehouse can find them, and gives the sticker somewhere to live.

Bag size follows from the folded garment rather than from the garment type. A folded piece has a footprint and a thickness, and the bag has to accommodate both plus whatever headspace the closure needs. That is why a bag specification that works for one fabric weight can be wrong for the same style in a heavier one, and why published bag dimensions by garment type are unreliable: they assume a fold and a thickness they cannot know.

Bag material is worth raising early where a programme has requirements around it, because material choices interact with destination-market packaging rules, covered on the pack-out hub. Claims about a material's environmental characteristics need evidence and definitions rather than adjectives, which is the same discipline applied to material certification.

The sticker

A sticker on the bag is how a warehouse identifies what is inside without opening it, and how a picker finds the right size in a mixed carton. What it carries is a buyer decision, and the useful split is between the part a person reads and the part a scanner reads.

They coexist rather than substituting for each other: a scanner cannot read a size printed in text, and a person cannot read a barcode. Where the identification data comes from and why a factory should not invent it is covered in GTIN, SSCC and logistics labels.

Placement is a specification line too. A sticker on the bag, on the garment, on a hangtag or on the hanger are four different decisions with different consequences for the receiving operation, and none of them is the default.

What to state

Most of that will be the same across a programme and only needs saying once. The lines that change per variant are the ones to get right first, because they are the ones that turn into physical rework if a value is wrong.

Individual packing for promotional distributors and merch web shops

Goods for a promotional distributor or a merch web shop are unpacked, picked and posted one piece at a time, so the individual pack has to work without anyone re-checking it. Bag size is stated per size band rather than once per style, because an XS and a 3XL hoodie fold to different footprints and thicknesses. Where the pieces go on to consumers, a resealable strip lets a returned garment go back into its bag, and any suffocation warning or other text the destination market and the shop require is printed on the bag. The size sticker carries the size in large type next to the variant barcode.

Carton counts are fixed by size, usually one size and colour per carton at an agreed count, so a shop can book stock in without opening every carton. These instructions are part of the pre-production data approved with the sample, next to the size chart and the placement sheet. Merch programmes are covered on the custom merch page and distributor orders on the promotional textiles page; mixed and solid cartons are compared in cartons, assortments and shipping marks.