Why MOQs Trip Up So Many New Fashion Brands
If you’ve ever asked a factory for a price and been hit back with “yes, but only if you order at least 500 pieces”, you’ve met an MOQ. Minimum order quantity. Three letters that decide more about your first collection than your fabric choice, your fit, or your brand name.
A founder I worked with last year had everything ready. Designs locked. Photography booked. Investors lined up. Then she went to a factory in Portugal, fell in love with their work, and got told the smallest run they’d take was 300 units per style, per colour. She had six styles and three colours each. That’s 5,400 garments. Her budget covered about 600.
This is the moment a lot of brands stall. Not because the idea is wrong, but because nobody told them how MOQs actually work, or what to do when the numbers don’t add up.
What an MOQ Really Is
An MOQ is the smallest number of units a factory will produce in one run. Sometimes it’s per style. Sometimes per colour. Sometimes per fabric. Sometimes all three at once.
Factories don’t set these numbers to be awkward. They set them because making clothes costs money before the sewing even starts. A pattern has to be digitised. A marker has to be laid. Fabric has to be cut. Machines have to be threaded with the right colour. A line has to pause while the new style runs. Whether you order 50 pieces or 500, those setup costs are roughly the same. The MOQ is the factory’s way of making sure the order is worth the trouble.
It’s also why fabric mills have their own MOQs. A mill weaving a custom colour for you is fitting your run into a production schedule that normally turns out thousands of metres. They need a minimum to make that worthwhile. On a recent project of mine — a cap for a private members’ club — the fabric MOQ has been one of the bigger constraints, not the cap itself.
Why the Numbers Vary So Wildly
A British factory making knitwear might want 30 pieces per colour. A Portuguese leather goods workshop might be happy with 25. A Chinese sportswear factory might insist on 500. An Italian mill weaving a custom cashmere blend might want 300 metres minimum.
Three things drive the difference. The first is the production process. Cut-and-sew is more flexible than knitwear, which is more flexible than fully-fashioned knitwear, which is more flexible than fabric that has to be specially woven or dyed.
The second is where the factory sits in the market. A small Portuguese workshop that specialises in start-ups and micro-brands has built its whole business around lower MOQs. A factory that supplies major high-street brands is set up to run thousands of pieces in a shift. The lower-MOQ factory will cost more per unit, but you can actually use it.
The third is you. If you walk in with a clear brief, a real budget, and the look of someone who’ll come back and reorder, factories will sometimes flex on their published MOQs. They want long-term relationships, not one-off jobs.
How Small Brands Get Around the Problem
There’s no clever trick. There are sensible decisions.
The first is to be ruthless about your range. New brands often want to launch with twenty styles. They can’t afford twenty styles. Five styles done well, in two or three colours, costs less in setup, in samples, in tech packs, and in MOQs. You can grow the range once you know what sells.
The second is to ask about shared production lines. Some factories run “open lines” where they sew several small brands’ orders together on the same fabric base, sharing the setup cost. The unit price is higher, but the MOQ drops — sometimes as low as 20 pieces. Worth asking about, especially in Portugal and parts of Italy.
The third is to choose fabrics from stock rather than custom-woven. A stock fabric from a mill or agent has no MOQ beyond the cut length you want. The downside is that anyone else can buy the same fabric. The upside is that you can start, and start cost effectively.
The fourth is to plan for two seasons up front. A factory that hesitates at 50 pieces for one drop will sometimes say yes to 50 pieces twice a year, with a verbal commitment to reorder. The total volume across the year hits their threshold, and you get a proper relationship out of it.
What I’d Watch Out For
Be cautious of factories that say yes to any MOQ without flinching. There’s usually a reason. Either the unit price is high enough to cover their losses, or they’re not actually making it themselves — they’ll farm it out to someone else, and you’ll lose control of the quality. Always ask where the work is being done, and visit if you can.
Don’t agree to a fabric MOQ without knowing exactly how many garments it covers. A mill that wants 500 metres of a particular twill might sound a lot, but if your jacket takes three metres, that’s only 166 jackets. Map fabric to garment before you commit.
And don’t let MOQs alone decide where you produce. Quality, communication, lead times, and whether the factory actually wants to work with a brand your size all matter more in the long run. A factory with a slightly higher MOQ that treats your project like it matters will beat a factory with no MOQ that doesn’t pick up the phone.
A Last Thought
The MOQ conversation is one of the first real reality checks a fashion founder gets. It’s where the idea meets the production line, and the production line wins. But it’s not a wall. It’s a constraint, and constraints make better collections. Smaller ranges, sharper colour stories, fewer hero pieces. The brands that handle MOQs well tend to be the ones that build something tight enough to grow.
I take on the brands I want to work with. There aren’t many. If you’re sitting on a collection idea and the production maths isn’t adding up, that’s the conversation worth having early.