take it, use it, send it to your tailor
The short answer
A tech pack is a technical specification document that tells a garment maker exactly what to produce: measurements with tolerances, materials, construction details, and references. For small fashion labels and one-off commissions, a simplified five-part tech pack is enough — garment overview, measurement spec, bill of materials, construction notes, and a quality verification tracker.
No email gate. Take it, use it, send it to your maker as-is.
A tech pack (technical package) is the document that translates a design into instructions a maker can execute without guessing. A full factory tech pack can run 15+ pages covering grading, costing, and packaging; a small label or individual commissioning a custom garment needs far less — but skipping it entirely is how “like the photo, but longer” becomes a garment you can’t wear.
If an instruction lives only in your head or scattered across DMs, it isn’t in the spec — and anything not in the spec is a guess. Ten minutes of tech pack saves ten weeks of remakes.
A simplified tech pack needs five sections: a garment overview, a measurement specification with tolerances, a bill of materials, construction notes, and a verification tracker. That’s exactly how the template is structured:
Overview
Garment name, style reference, client, maker, deadlines (with a shipping and revision buffer built in), and who is sourcing fabric. Also the place to state your size basis — made-to-measure or standard sizing.
Measurement specification
Every measurement point with a target and a tolerance (e.g. waist 74 cm ± 1 cm). Two things matter more than anything else on this sheet: state whether each number is a body measurement or a garment measurement — this single ambiguity causes more fit failures than any other — and give tolerances, because "exactly 74.0 cm" isn't how fabric works, and a tolerance makes pass/fail objective instead of a mood. In the template, your maker fills in the actual finished measurements at final verification, and a Pass/Check column calculates automatically against your tolerances.
Bill of materials
Every fabric, trim, and notion: composition, weight, width, colour, quantity, and who sources it. This is what your maker photographs against before anything is cut — catching a fabric substitution at this stage costs one message; catching it at delivery costs the garment.
Construction notes
One instruction per row, short sentences, no idiom. "Snug but not restrictive" translates badly across languages; "negative ease 2 cm at bust" doesn't. Include seam finishes, hem depth, closures, lining, and structure. Leave a column for the maker's questions to come back before you lock the spec — a maker who asks questions at this stage is a maker worth keeping.
Evidence gate tracker (G0–G5)
A per-garment verification tracker: spec lock (G0), materials verified (G1), cut confirmed (G2), construction checkpoint (G3), finished garment verified (G4), delivery confirmed (G5). Each gate passes only with photo evidence, and the tracker maps suggested payment milestones to gates — deposit at G0, mid-payment after G3, balance after G4 and before shipping.
The tracker on sheet five is based on the G0–G5 evidence gate framework — the same per-garment verification system that runs every MadeApt commission.
Attach a flat sketch — front and back — alongside the spreadsheet. It doesn’t need to be professional: a clean phone photo of a hand drawing beats three paragraphs of description. Annotate reference photos rather than just sending them: circle the neckline you mean, and say explicitly what you’re not referencing (“this photo is for the sleeve only”) so your maker doesn’t faithfully reproduce a bodice you never wanted.
Yes — a simplified one. The tech pack isn’t a factory formality; it’s the shared source of truth that makes a dispute impossible, because “does this match?” always has an answer. It matters more for one-off garments than production runs, because there’s no sample round to catch misunderstandings: the first garment is the only garment. It matters even more again when your maker is overseas and every correction crosses a language barrier and a shipping route — for the full workflow around this template, see our guide to working with overseas tailors without getting burned.
Download the .xlsx
Fill in the yellow cells on sheets 1–4 (each sheet has one italic example row showing the format — overwrite it).
Adapt the measurement sheet
Delete measurement rows you don’t need and add garment-specific ones (strap length, boning channels, train length).
Attach your flat sketch
And your annotated reference photos.
Send the whole package to your maker
Ask for their questions — their answers and your replies become part of the locked spec.
Confirm G0 in writing
On the tracker sheet, before anything is cut — then let the gates run production from there.
MadeApt is a made-to-measure platform connecting clients with vetted artisan tailors in Bosnia, Vietnam, and Australia, with per-garment QC evidence gates (G0–G5) built into every commission — photo-verified at each stage and visible to the client in real time.
git commit -m "spec, locked"
Download the template, lock your spec, and brief your maker with evidence gates built in — or commission through MadeApt, where the same structure runs every garment.