A tech pack is the document your manufacturer uses to make your garment. It defines every measurement, material, color, stitch, label, and trim, so the factory builds exactly what you designed. Every serious brand works from one. Here's what goes inside, and why it matters.
From a first hoodie to a full collection, the tech pack is what stands between your idea and a production-ready product. Get it right and you avoid sampling errors, miscommunication, and delays. New to all this? Start with how to start a clothing brand; the tech pack is one step in that journey.
What Is a Tech Pack, Exactly?
A tech pack is a standardized set of specifications that communicates your design to a manufacturer. Designers, sourcing teams, and factories all read from the same document, which removes ambiguity from the production process. Instead of describing your garment in emails or messages, you hand over one file that answers every question a factory might have.
A clear tech pack does three things:
- Translates your vision into instructions a factory can follow precisely
- Creates a shared reference so everyone is working from the same source of truth
- Protects you when a sample comes back wrong, the spec is documented, so corrections are fast and accountable
What's Inside a Tech Pack?
While formats vary, almost every professional tech pack includes the same core sections:
- Cover / style summary, style name, number, season, designer, and a quick overview of the garment
- Technical flats (sketches), front, back, and detail views drawn to scale, often with callouts pointing to specific features
- Bill of materials (BOM), every fabric, thread, zipper, button, label, and trim, with supplier and placement details
- Points of measurement (spec sheet), exact measurements for each size, including how the garment is graded across the size range
- Construction details, seam types, stitching, hems, and assembly notes
- Colorways, every color version of the style, with Pantone or reference codes
- Labels, trims & packaging, branding, care labels, hangtags, and how the finished product should be packed
If you want to see how these sections fit together, our spec sheets guide breaks down the measurement portion in detail, and you can grab a ready-made layout from our free tech pack template.
Tech Pack vs. Spec Sheet: What's the Difference?
People often use the terms interchangeably, but they aren't the same thing. A spec sheet is the measurement table, the points of measurement and grading for each size. A tech pack is the complete package: the spec sheet plus the flats, BOM, construction notes, colorways, and packaging. In other words, the spec sheet lives inside the tech pack.
Why Every Brand Needs One
Skipping the tech pack is one of the most expensive mistakes new founders make. Without one:
- Factories interpret your design however they like, and samples come back wrong
- You pay for extra rounds of sampling and shipping to fix avoidable errors
- Quotes are inaccurate, because the factory is pricing a garment it doesn't fully understand
- Reordering becomes unreliable, since there's no documented standard to reproduce
With a solid tech pack, you get accurate quotes, fewer sampling rounds, consistent reorders, and a far smoother relationship with your manufacturer.
Who Creates and Uses Tech Packs?
Technical designers traditionally build tech packs, often in Adobe Illustrator paired with spreadsheets. But today independent designers and emerging brands create their own, especially with tools that automate the heavy lifting. Once finished, the tech pack is shared with sample makers, factories, and sourcing partners, everyone who touches the product references it.
How to Create a Tech Pack
You have three realistic options:
1. Do it manually, draw flats in Illustrator and build the BOM and spec sheet in a spreadsheet. Maximum control, but slow and error-prone.
2. Start from a template, fill in a pre-built layout so you don't miss a section. Our free tech pack template gives you every section above, ready to complete.
3. Let Aria build it for you, Aria is Tchpack's AI assistant. Give it a sketch, a reference photo, or a few details and it researches, drafts editable flats, and assembles a structured tech pack for you. You can work with Aria right on the Tchpack website, inside Adobe Illustrator with the Tchpack plugin, or in the Tchpack app.
For a full walkthrough, read our step-by-step guide on how to create a tech pack.
From Tech Pack to Finished Product
A tech pack isn't the finish line, it's the handoff. The real goal is getting your garment made by the right factory. That's the gap Tchpack is built to close: it's a full platform where you design your mockups, build production-ready tech packs with Aria, Tchpack's AI assistant that researches details and assembles the pack from a sketch or photo, and then match directly with vetted manufacturers suited to your specific garment. Aria works wherever you do: on the web, inside Adobe Illustrator with the plugin, or in the app. Instead of stitching together separate tools for design, documentation, and sourcing, you move from idea to manufacturer in one place.
If you're comparing dedicated tools, our best tech pack software guide walks through the top platforms and where each one fits.