UK or overseas: deciding where to make your collection

Every founder I work with asks some version of this question, usually early, usually as if there's a single right answer sitting somewhere waiting to be found. UK or overseas. Make it here, or make it abroad.

Most of the advice you'll read on it is written by someone who sells one of the two answers — a UK factory that wants your order, or an agent who places production in Portugal, Turkey or China and earns when you do. I don't own a factory and I'm not tied to one. The maker is chosen around the product, nothing else, so I've no reason to push you either way.

And the thing worth saying plainly is this: UK-or-overseas is the wrong question. The real one is what your order volumes, your margins and your cash can actually carry this season. Get that straight and the location mostly answers itself. Get it wrong and the lowest unit price in the world won't save you.

So let me lay out what each side really buys you, what it costs, and then the option most brands I see actually need.

What UK production buys you

Proximity, mostly — and everything that comes with it.

You get speed. A UK run can be cut and finished in four to six weeks rather than three to four months. You get fittings in the room: when a sample isn't sitting right, you're there to pin it, not waiting on photos and a courier. You get small runs — a good UK maker will take fifty or a hundred units where an overseas factory won't get out of bed for under a few hundred. Communication is easier because you share a language, a time zone and a set of assumptions about what "finished properly" means. And reorders are quick, which matters more than founders expect — the ability to make sixty, see what sells, and have the bestseller back in stock in five weeks is a genuine advantage.

What it costs you is unit price, and sometimes capacity. UK making is more expensive per garment, occasionally by a lot. The volume any one workshop can absorb is smaller. And for some categories the capability simply isn't here — fine knitwear, certain footwear, technical outerwear are made better, or only, elsewhere. Worth remembering too that "made in the UK" rarely means the fabric and trims are British; those usually still come from abroad.

What overseas production buys you

Unit price, capacity and capability — the three things that get harder to find at home as you grow.

The per-unit cost at volume can be a half or a third of the UK equivalent. Factories exist that can take thousands of units without blinking. And the depth of specialism is real: there are towns built around one thing, doing it for decades, with a supply chain of mills and trims wrapped around them.

What it costs you is a longer list, and most of it is invisible until you're in it.

Minimums are the big one — the per-colour, per-style quantities a factory needs before the maths works for them. (There's a companion piece on exactly how MOQs are calculated and what you can negotiate; it's worth reading before you commit.) Lead times run in months, not weeks. Quality control happens at a distance, which means you're trusting someone else's eyes or paying to fly out. Communication crosses time zones and languages, and small misunderstandings get expensive when they're discovered on three hundred finished garments. Freight and duty are real money and real paperwork, particularly into the UK now. And then there's cash: you'll typically pay a deposit up front and the balance before the goods ship, so your money is tied up for the whole production-and-shipping window — often three to four months — before a single unit is on a shelf earning anything back.

The third option most brands actually need

Almost nobody has to pick one side for everything. The answer most of my clients land on is to split the job.

Develop and sample close to home, where proximity pays — fittings, fast iterations, getting the fit and the make exactly right while you can still be in the room. Then, once the design is locked and you've got a gold-seal sample everyone's signed off, send the actual production run wherever the volumes make sense. For a brand selling eighty units a style that might still be the UK. For the same brand selling eight hundred a style two years later, it almost certainly isn't.

That last point matters: this isn't a decision you make once. The right answer changes as you grow, and the brands that handle production well revisit it every couple of seasons rather than marrying the first factory that said yes.

A worked example

Let me put rough numbers on it. These are illustrative, not anyone's real costs — a generic jersey sweatshirt, launching at £90 retail, roughly £40 wholesale.

Made in the UK at a small run of sixty to a hundred-and-fifty units, your cost per piece might land somewhere around £22 to £28. Lead time four to six weeks. The minimum is low, so you can make sixty, see how they sell, and reorder.

Made overseas, the same sweatshirt might cost £9 to £14 a unit — but with a minimum of three hundred per colour, a lead time of twelve to sixteen weeks before freight, plus duty on the way in, plus the deposit cash sitting with the factory the whole time.

The overseas unit is less than half the price. It looks like the obvious win. But run the maths on margin, cash and unsold stock together, not separately. At sixty UK units you might barely break even per piece, yet you've only risked around £1,500 of stock and you can restock a winner in five weeks. Overseas, you make far more per unit — if you sell three hundred. Sell a hundred and twenty of those three hundred and the dead stock quietly wipes out every penny the cheaper unit price gained you, and then some.

The cheaper garment isn't cheaper if it forces you to buy more than you can sell.

How to actually decide

Five honest questions usually settle it:

• How many units per style can you realistically sell this season — honestly, not hopefully?

• What's your cash position? Can you have money tied up for three to four months without it hurting?

• Does the category need a capability you can't get close to home?

• How much is fast reordering worth to you?

• Can your margins survive the higher UK unit price — or can your cash survive the overseas minimum?

If you're selling small and need to stay nimble, home or near-shore usually wins despite the unit cost. If you've got proven demand, the cash to fund it and volumes that clear the minimums, overseas starts to pay. Most brands sit somewhere in between, which is exactly why the split approach tends to win.

Whatever you decide, decide it on your numbers, not on someone else's sales pitch — and look at it again next season.

If you're weighing this decision for a real collection, this is the work I do — finding the right maker for the product, here or abroad, and managing it through to delivery. Project work is available by enquiry.