The buyer asks for documents a studio of one does not have.
Line sheets, costings and tech packs take the week you needed for the product.
The documents come out as finished files from what you already have.
Solutions · Independent designers
You are the whole team. So is this.
A one-person label does every job a hundred-person brand does, on the same calendar, with the same buyers asking for the same documents. The gap is capacity, not talent.
Jobs held at once
Fashion Designer · Buyer / Merchandiser · Sourcing Analyst · Finance Analyst
A hundred-person brand splits these across four departments. You hold all four.
The one job this page is about
Turn up to a stockist meeting with the documents a buyer expects.
- How often it comes round
- Every market appointment, every stockist conversation.
- Skip it once
- The buyer's interest stops at the document you do not have, and it does not come back next season.
Landed cost
What it costs by the time it reaches you.
The components in the order they hit, including the three that get left off a first sheet: sampling rounds, freight and duty.
Materials
Trims
Make
Sampling
Freight
Duty
Waste
- Materials
- Shell, lining, interlining, at the minimum you can actually buy
- Trims
- Hardware, labels, thread - the lines that get estimated and never checked
- Make
- Cut, make, trim at the factory's real minimum, not the quoted one
- Sampling
- Every round before the one that gets approved
- Freight
- Mode, incoterm and who is carrying the risk at each leg
- Duty
- The HS code and the origin, which is where a costing is usually wrong
- Waste
- Yield loss between the marker and the cut
The components and their order, not a split. Knitwear, leather goods and jersey do not share a cost shape - yours is computed from your own spec and minimums.
The appointment
A studio of one, asked for a studio of thirty's paperwork.
Buyers do not discount for a small team. The difference is capacity, not talent.
Sourcing at low volume means being told no.
Small runs get the least attention, and finding a mill that takes one is a full-time search.
A spec is matched to a ranked shortlist of verified factories, quoted comparably.
Everything is decided alone.
No merchandiser, no analyst, no second opinion before the money is spent.
The parts that want a specialist go to one, so the call gets a second read.
Use cases · the season, in order
Four jobs, in series, on one calendar.
A hundred-person brand runs these in parallel. Running them in series is the entire difference.
- 01Collection
Say what the collection is, properly.
The part that is genuinely yours, and the part that gets the least time.
You hand overSalt & Iron - Graduate Collection Statement
- 02Costing
Work out what it actually costs to land.
A costing done after the sample is a costing done too late to change anything.
You hand overLanded Cost & Margin Model
Landed Cost & Margin Model - 03Selling
Make the line sheet a buyer can order from.
Buyers do not discount for a small team. The paperwork bar is the same.
You hand overSÖNDER - SS26 Wholesale Linesheet
- 04Funding
Build the case for the next step.
Winning the order and being able to make it are two different wins.
You hand overCORDA - 8-Week Pop-Up Business Case
One desk
What a designer working alone actually gets.
A label of one still needs the four specialists a brand of a hundred has. This is where they come from.
The desk
- Fashion Designer
- Buyer / Merchandiser
- Sourcing Analyst
- Finance Analyst
Reaches for
Print-quality PDF · Editable deck · Everything packaged together · Ranked factory shortlist · Verified factory directory · RFQs, sent and compared · Specialist hand-off · A team of specialists in parallel · Multi-angle research sweep
Reports
3 briefings written for independent designers.
Each one is the finished file, opened in full. Every figure in them is illustrative and each says so on its own cover; a real run researches and cites its numbers with an as-of year.
Built with
The studios behind this one.
Get started
Arrive with the paperwork already done.
Start with the question a independent designer actually has, and leave with the file.