Host Heather Zager talks all about tech packs, spec sheets, and patterns in today’s episode. She explains the differences between each one and the function each one performs. A spec sheet is short for a specification sheet. The single difference between it and a tech pack is that a spec sheet is just one page. A tech pack - or technical package or technical specification package - is essentially an instruction manual with all the information needed to create a sewn product. A pattern is a paper pattern used for sewing a product.

Heather goes into great detail about what a tech pack could and should include. The summary of the points she discusses is:

The possible variations and trade-offs in information included in tech packs are explained by Heather and she breaks down exactly how a pattern works, when spec sheets are useful, and what other episodes of her podcast will explain certain pieces of information in greater detail. Heather’s knowledge and expertise help to make the process of designing and manufacturing sewn goods easier to understand and less daunting to attempt. 

Heather Zager found her calling when she signed up for a beginning pattern-making course and realized she had a passion for technical design. She subsequently enrolled in the Apparel Design and Development program at Seattle Central College and graduated two years later with her Associate of Applied Science Degree.

After graduation, she began working with Meta assisting in developing and designing augmented and virtual reality wearable tech gear. In 2020, MADE Apparel Services was born with the idea of helping makers, inventors and designers bring their own sewn product ideas to manufacture. Since then, she has worked with various businesses such as Santa’s Tailor, Feathered Friends, Wolfpack Gear and Classic Accessories, helping them achieve their goals in design, development, pattern making, sewn construction and manufacture.

Today, Heather continues to grow her knowledge and share her experiences with others to bring their visions to reality.

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Heather Zager: [00:00:00] Hello everyone and welcome to the Made Apparel Services Podcast. My name is Heather Zager and I will be your host for this series. I am also the founder of Made Apparel Services, which is a sewn product development company for small brands. Whether you are just starting out or a seasoned pro, I have a lot of resources to help you on your journey to manufacture. Don't forget to sign up for my newsletter and follow me on social media for other fun updates. Links to both are always in the show notes.

Heather Zager: [00:00:29] Hello and welcome back to my podcast channel. My name is Heather Zager with Made Apparel Services. And today I'm going to talk about the difference between a tech pack, a spec sheet and a pattern. And by pattern I mean a paper pattern you use for sewing a sewn product, not the pattern on your sheets or your wallpaper. First, they are all something different and it is very straightforward. But let's start with talking about a spec sheet, as this is the one that people seem to misunderstand the most and may not even be realizing it. So a spec sheet is short for specification sheet. The single key difference between this and a tech pack is that a spec sheet is just one page. Now, a spec sheet is commonly thought of as a summary page that highlights the most important features of a sewn design, but this means that several specs end up on a single page at one time, and this can become a problem in manufacture, and I'll explain more on that in a moment.

Heather Zager: [00:01:35] In the way that people think of a spec sheet, it would actually be more appropriate to call the single page a design summary. There are a few disadvantages to a design summary. First, there is no standard for how these should look or what they should contain. Second, if there is too much information within your design summary, it can become hard to read and confusing. Imagine if Ikea crammed all of their furniture construction information into a single page. Alternatively, if you don't have enough information, then there will be a lot of details you leave to the manufacturer to figure out. So the answer to this problem is to use a tech pack instead. A tech pack or technical package or technical specification package can be thought of as an instruction manual that includes all the information needed to create a sewn product. There are varying opinions on how much information a tech pack should contain, but for my clients, my goal is to keep the manufacturer from guessing on anything. You can certainly get to manufacturer with just a design summary or a spec sheet, but you open yourself up to misunderstandings and confusions that will then push out deadlines, even if those deadlines are only self-imposed and increase costs, along with create frustration for both you and your manufacturer.

Heather Zager: [00:02:58] To give you an idea of what a thorough and complete tech pack will look like, mine are usually no less than around 11 pages if each spec is just one page. Now, a spec can span more than one page if needed, but should only be covering the details of that spec within those pages. For example, a pattern pieces list. You might need more than one page to list all of your pattern pieces if you have a more complicated design, like an outdoor jacket that's lined with lots of pockets and plackets and buttons. And that's okay, because your spec is still the pattern pieces list across two pages. The 11 pages that I just mentioned that are in my tech pack are as follows, and these will be listed in the show notes for you. First page of your tech pack is just a cover page or an overview page. It will contain just a description and some black and white sketches. The description will be a long sentence that describes the design and the features that go into it. The sketches are just black and white sketches, usually just a front and a back, but you can also include a side view if you feel that's helpful to convey your concept. And that's all. They will look at this and decide if it's something that they can produce or not. And if they can't, it may not be because they don't want to, it just may be because they don't have the machinery or the equipment to do the features of your design.

Heather Zager: [00:04:24] The next page would be your fabrications page. Now, this is going to list only the materials or the fabrics that go into making your concept. Your main material or the shell. The lining, if you have lining, any interfacing, which is a material that's inserted into the fabric to help give it some stiffness and some structure, it's underneath and you can't see it or it's inside between the lining and the shell. So those materials all get listed here. You'll indicate the content of them, the width of the roll, the colorway of your sample that you're sewing, not all of your colorways, but just the one sample that you'll be giving them with this, and the number of yards that are needed to create this one particular sample. You can also include some swatches on this page, so they can touch and feel the fabric and get an idea of what it is that they're working with.

Heather Zager: [00:05:15] The next page is the pattern layout page by fabrication. This is a great example of a spec that will span more than one page if you have more than one fabrication. It's just a thumbnail view of your pattern pieces laid out on that particular fabrication for them to get an idea of what kind of space the pattern will take for just one sample. And that's it. And you don't even have to include this in your tech pack, but it is a nice feature. They can just see in one view all of the layouts for the different fabrications of your pattern. The next specification page would be the bill of materials, and a lot of people have heard of this before. It's really just a laundry list of all the materials, not fabrics, but materials that will go into constructing your garments. So the thread, the thread is an important one. Buttons, labels, any elastic zippers. It all goes here. And you'll indicate the brand or type, the size, the length if it's a cut length like elastic, the content, the color, the location on the garment and how many are used, such as buttons. You might have a four hole button that's 7/16 inch in size, made of plastic, it's white and it goes on the front button placket and you need eight of them. So that's the kind of information that gets listed in the bill of materials. And, again, this is something that can span more than one page.

Heather Zager: [00:06:46] The next page would be your pattern pieces list, also known as a cutters must or a pattern parts list. This is going to list all the pattern pieces in numerical order that are in your pattern file, and how many to cut of each piece. For example, your sleeve may be piece number three in your pattern file, but you need to cut two. And it's separated by fabrication, and this just gives your manufacturer a one shot view of what your pattern file is going to look like. That's it. Next is the sequence of construction, also known as the order of operations, and this page is just the written instructions that is literally the sequence of the construction of your garment. It has to go together in a particular order. And this page, or pages if you have a very complex design, will explain to the manufacturer how to do that.

Heather Zager: [00:07:38] Your tech pack should also include several pages of annotations which are call outs. Each page would call out different annotations. One would be just stitch types, another would be just the fabrications, another would be just your colorways. You can reuse the same sketches from your cover page to do this and you just change the animations. If you could overlay them, take off the stitches annotations, and then put on the fabrications annotations, it would be replicated almost exactly the same through each page. You might have a page where you need a close up or a more detailed illustration, and you can add that in. But that's the gist of your callout pages. And they can be more detailed or less detailed depending on your design. There are a couple of other pages that you could just add to your tech pack that could be interesting for your manufacturer to see, but also help you to track information. One is supplier information. If you've done a lot of sourcing of your own materials and trims, you might want to start a list of supplier names and their contact information. What it was you ordered from them, how much it costs. Your manufacturer might look at that and recommend a different supplier, or be able to source something at a better price for you. So having that information in there not only helps you to keep track of where you got the items, but the cost of them, and quite possibly you can get a better rate if a manufacturer can see what it is that you've been doing.

Heather Zager: [00:09:06] You might also include packaging information. If you have a particular box size or type of tissue paper or an insert that you want to include and your manufacturer is doing that for you, put that information in there on one page. One final page that you can add to your tech pack would be a space for special notes and another space for version updates. A special note would be something that just doesn't fit anywhere else in the tech pack, but you feel it's important to include. The version update area would be, any time you make a change to your tech pack, or you find a mistake and fix it, write the date, write what it is that you did, and then the page number it was on and just keep track of that versioning history so that you have that history. If you don't remember if you made a change or not, you can look back and go, oh, right, I did do that. It just helps to keep it a little bit more organized.

Heather Zager: [00:09:56] I realize that that's a lot of information, and you might be feeling a bit overwhelmed, but keep in mind that every detail that you leave out, your manufacturer will have to fill it in, and that can become an unpleasant surprise for you later. Listen to my podcast on 'Preparing for Manufacturer' to get a better understanding of why development is so important. But also, if you have already started on a tech pack and are concerned that it isn't complete or just aren't sure what parts of it mean, or all of it means, I do have a tech pack review service. And if you mention you heard about it in this podcast, it's only $49 and I think it's normally like $200. So it's a big savings. And the link to that service is in the show notes if you want to take a look at that page on my website to see if that's something that will work for you. A factory can create your patterns for you just from those measurements. There are trade offs, though. Not every manufacturer can or will do this, so it narrows down the potential production partners that you can use for manufacture. You will also not have your own patterns and if you request them, if they provide them to you, it might be a very scaled down, internal only version that is hard for the next factory to understand, and perhaps not even in a file format that is compatible with the next factory. Eventually you may be paying to have the pattern done again anyway, but you start to get the idea that you can scale down, just make sure you're fully informed about what the trade off might be. Otherwise, you'll be surprised and it can be very frustrating and time consuming to backtrack.

Heather Zager: [00:11:30] Let's wrap up this podcast with talking about what the pattern is. Now, I mentioned that you can leave that out. And that's because it is a very different thing from the tech pack and the spec sheet. If you Google 'what is a sewing pattern', numerous sources will describe it as an instruction guide, and I think that is where people start to get confused about the differences between tech packs and patterns. A pattern may include a printed set of instructions, but the pattern itself is far from instructional. At least not to someone who hasn't had any training in reading patterns, or sewing, or doing any kind of pattern making. When I think of the blueprint of a design, I think of the pattern, not the tech pack. The pattern itself contains all the shapes that are needed to construct your design. These paper shapes are just transfer templates. They are individually cut out of the paper and then each paper shape is laid onto the fabric and traced. Once all the shapes are traced, they are cut out of the fabric and then sewn together in that particular order, which is your sequence of construction, to create your final sewn design. In my world, nothing says blueprint more than that.

Heather Zager: [00:12:38] If all of that wasn't clear, you might best understand the differences between a tech pack, a spec sheet, and a pattern with an analogy. If you think of a recipe for baking a gingerbread house, it has a lot of correlations. The list of ingredients, amount of each ingredient to be used, and the instructions for combining and cooking them are each a spec sheet. The paper pieces you overlay onto the gingerbread dough to cut out the house walls, the roof and so on, are the pattern, and all of that information combined together is your tech pack. Your finished gingerbread house becomes your sample, and if it all turned out exactly as you wanted, that becomes your pre-production package. You take all of that to the baker and say, here is everything you need to create my design. Can you do this type of work? What will it cost to make x of them exactly the same as this sample? Hopefully they say yes and you have a match made in heaven. But if not, ask them why. Is it a limitation on their side with their equipment or their skills or experience? Or is there something missing in your tech pack and take that constructive feedback from them. That's it for today's podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in and I hope you enjoyed listening. Stay tuned for more episodes. I usually have a new one released every two weeks, so make sure you subscribe so you get the earliest notification that a new one is out.

Heather Zager: [00:14:00] Thank you for listening to today's episode. We hope that you enjoyed it. If we didn't answer all of your questions, or you just have some comments or suggestions about future podcast episodes, please email me at heather@madeapparelservices.com.