In the end, your products hold the essence that carries your brand’s reputation. Low-quality items damage your company’s reputation through unhappy customers, resulting in lower revenue. Not to mention how the age of social media makes it easier for a dissatisfied client to spread the information to other prospective customers swiftly.
Offering customers high-quality products is the best approach to meeting their expectations, and delivering these high-quality items with a complete quality control system is also possible. Quality assurance should be a practice for the entire process, from initial production to final delivery. Only when a company has robust quality control procedures can it ensure that clients always receive products free of flaws.
What is Garment Inspection?
Garment inspection is an essential concept in the ready-made clothing industry. The primary personnel in apparel inspection are also quality inspectors, who certify the garment’s quality and evaluate whether it is suitable for shipping. At several stages of the garment inspection, the quality inspector must guarantee flawless quality.
The supply chains of numerous clothing importers now heavily rely on third-party inspection like the EC Quality Global inspection, ensuring the quality inspection process goes smoothly. With an inspection team on the ground, you can see exactly how your products look without needing to visit the factory to check personally.
Importance of garment inspection procedures
Quality inspection is still a required and efficient quality control method. However, it needs to catch up to quality prevention and not be treated as an afterthought. The benefit of quality control is that if we view the prevention of quality defects as the main option, it’s less likely to prevent every defect from reoccurring. Therefore, it is still required to increase quality inspection even while quality prevention is improved. Any garment inspection is adequately planned out in preparation for the product’s inspection procedures, bringing every component of the product under visual inspection control and eliminating the missing inspection issue.
Steps in Garment Quality Inspection
In the garment industry, textile inspection is arduous and time-consuming. You should ensure quality control begins from obtaining raw materials to the finished garment stage. EC Quality Global inspection helps to ensure quality in the apparel manufacturing sector at many levels. These include:
● Raw material inspection
● Quality inspection during production
● Post-production quality evaluation
1. Raw Material Inspection
Several raw materials are used to create a finished article of clothing, including fabric, buttons, grippers for zippers, and sewing thread. The raw materials’ quality significantly impacts the finished product’s quality. Therefore, checking the raw materials’ quality before beginning the sewing is essential.
Here’s all you need to consider while inspecting the raw materials:
● Start by reviewing the fabric:
The fabric goes through a 4-point or 10-point inspection system, which checks various material factors. These include dye quality, colorfastness, irritability to the skin, and more. Since the fabric comes in direct contact with the skin of the wearer, it requires thorough checking for quality. Start by looking at the material. At this stage, the inspectors examine the fabric for several characteristics, including dye quality, colorfastness, skin irritation, etc.
● The quality requires careful examination:
Next, the quality of the remaining raw materials is examined, including the trims, zippers, grippers, and buttons. You must verify that these materials are reliable, the proper size, color, and so forth. When inspecting a zipper, the sliders, puller, or pull tab helps to see if the zipper runs smoothly. The finished garment must also complement the zipper’s color, which must undergo evaluations to see if it complies with the other buyer requirements, such as non-toxic, nickel-free, azo-free, etc.
● Examine the sewing thread:
The sewing thread determines the durability of the garment. Therefore, it is also for evaluating tenacity, yarn count, elongation, and ply. The thread’s color is also essential as it must complement the item of clothing. Some other aspects of the garment to examine include broken buttons, uniform color across the board, a size that complies with the buyer’s criteria, etc.
2.Quality inspection during production
Cutting, assembling, pressing, and other finishing methods are essential when sewing clothes and for final inspections. The cutting of the pattern pieces along the grain must be with accuracy. Assembling the cut pattern parts must also be precisely and carefully done.
Poor sewing technique or a lack of focus could have austere effects on the following assembly or other parts. For instance, sewing is challenging as the skewed cloth pieces will only fit together smoothly. Poorly manufactured clothing has seams that are sloppy and have pop stitches. If not adequately pressed, the dress will not fit the body correctly and may become permanently wrinkled. The following discussion covers the numerous production procedures for the quality control of garments.
Check for cutting defects:
Cutting is a crucial step in garment creation. Cutting precise components that will fit together during assembly requires precision. Frayed edges, fuzzy, ragged, or serrated edges, ply-to-ply fusion, single-edge fusion, pattern imprecision, incorrect notches, and improper drilling are cutting flaws. Careless cutting can lead to garment faults, possibly overcutting the prior piece. Parts of the garment are missing around the edge of the lay. Features of the clothing can distort if they are excessively tight or loose, and slits can incorrectly open or be skipped.
Check for defects in assembling:
The pattern parts are cut and put together. Several problems and flaws might appear while stitching. The term “assembling faults” refers to flaws in seams and stitching. Incorrectly formed stitches, skipped stitches, broken stitches, incorrect or unequal stitch density, balloon stitches, broken threads, clogged stitches, hangnails, and needle damage are just a few examples of stitching flaws that could occur. The following are seam flaws: seam pucker, seam smile, inappropriate or unequal breadth, incorrect shape, shaky backstitching, twisted seam, mismatched seam, additional material caught in the stitching, inverted garment section, and wrong seam type.
Defects during pressing and finishing
Pressing is one of the last preparations to help set seams and complete garment shaping. Burnt clothing, water spots, changes in original color, flattened surface or nap, improperly created creases, uneven edges or rippling pockets, improperly shaped garments, and shrinking from moisture and heat are just a few examples pressing and finishing flaws.
3.Post-production quality evaluation
Wear testing for realistic responses to commonplace situations and testing with a simulation study when a consumer’s dependability is in doubt are two examples of post-production quality reviews in the garment industry. Companies give products to a selected group of consumers for wear testing, often known as product testing.
Before making a whole production lot of clothes, customers contact the company to raise problems with the product. Similar to wear testing, simulation study testing can raise concerns about a consumer’s safety. Before constructing a whole production lot, businesses would simulate-test products like helmets or test the performance of nonskid shoes on slick areas. Additional factors in evaluating post-production quality include appearance retention and maintenance.
Conclusion
Effectively managing quality helps costs stay within reasonable bounds, making clients happy. For any producer, trader, or exporter of clothing, quality control, and inspection in production, pre-sales, after-sales service, delivery, pricing, etc., are crucial.
The garment inspection procedures can quickly resolve the factory inspection of apparel products, utilizing various inspectors at various times per the inspection’s pre-designed provisions. It helps to ensure that every product component is subject to visual inspection and completely eradicates the occurrence of missed inspections.
Post time: Feb-10-2023