Product DevelopmentAugust 22, 2026Updated September 10, 202610 min read

The Hoodie Tech Pack: Every Field That Changes Your Sample

A tech pack is the document that turns your idea into something a factory can cut. If you have read our general guide to tech packs you already know the structure. This is the hoodie-specific layer on top of it — because a hoodie has components a t-shirt does not, and every one of them is a place where an unstated assumption becomes a sample you did not want.

By Raj Rahman, Founder & Managing Director

Technical flat drawing of a hoodie with callouts

What a complete tech pack contains

Before the hoodie-specific fields, the shape of the document. Garment development runs on a tech pack: the technical documentation carrying the technical specifications and production specifications a factory builds from. For most designers it is the least interesting page of the job, and it is the one a factory reads first — so it is the page where a designer earns the sample they wanted. It is not a mood board — research, inspiration and concept work come first, and the place to explore alternatives is there rather than here. What the factory receives should answer every question it would otherwise have to ask.

The pages a factory-ready tech pack carries

A factory-ready pack runs to a handful of pages and they are always the same ones: a cover with the style name, season and size range; a technical flat drawn to scale from your design sketches, front and back; a bill of materials listing every fabric, trim and label; a measurement chart; a spec sheet carrying the construction details and construction methods; and a decoration sheet. Garment complexity sets the page count, because every feature has to be drawn and dimensioned — a plain crew tee needs three pages, an oversized zip hoodie with contrast panels needs eight.

Excel, PDF, and what to actually send

Build it in Excel, because a measurement chart is a table and a table wants a spreadsheet — we publish a free tech pack template you can download. Then export to PDF for the version you send, so pages and drawings land the same way on every screen. Send both: the PDF is what the floor prints, the spreadsheet is what costing works from.

Points of measure: the eight that decide the fit

Every measurement should be given for one base size, flat, in centimetres or inches consistently, with a tolerance. These are the ones that actually determine whether the hoodie looks like your reference.

Chest width, measured 2.5 cm below the armhole — the number that sets the silhouette
Body length from high point of shoulder, which is what makes a hoodie cropped, regular or long
Shoulder width, or a note that the style is drop-shoulder and where the seam falls
Sleeve length from centre back neck, and separately the bicep and cuff opening
Hood height and hood width, measured flat — the most commonly omitted pair on any hoodie pack
Pocket width, height, and its distance from the hem
Rib depth at cuff and hem, stated separately because they are frequently different
Neck drop and neck width, which govern how the hood sits when it is down

Building the measurement chart

Lay the hoodie tech pack measurements out as a table: one row per point of measure, one column per size, base size marked. Give the grade rule alongside it — that is what the pattern room works from. Most designers send a single size and assume the rest follow proportionally, but bodies do not scale evenly, and accurate proportions across a size run come from a stated grade rather than multiplication.

Tolerance and seam allowance

Every measurement needs a tolerance — normally ±1 cm on a chest measurement, ±0.5 cm on smaller points. Without one, a garment 2 cm out is neither clearly right nor clearly wrong. Seam allowance is a separate field and belongs in the construction notes rather than the chart, because it describes assembly rather than the finished dimension.

Fabric and rib: two callouts, not one

State the body fabric as weight plus construction plus composition — "380 GSM brushed loopback fleece, 80% cotton / 20% polyester" — rather than "heavyweight fleece". The first is buildable; the second invites the factory to guess, and the guess will be whatever is in stock.

Then specify the rib separately. Cuffs and waistband are a different fabric from the body: 2x2 or 1x1, its weight, its composition, and crucially its elastane content. Rib with no elastane relaxes after a few wears and the cuffs go slack — the most common complaint about a first hoodie order, and it traces back to a pack that said "matching rib" and nothing else.

If you want the rib dyed to match the body exactly, say so. Body and rib are dyed in separate lots, and a close match is not an exact one — on a garment-dyed program they match because they are dyed together, but a piece-dyed program needs a stated tolerance.

Writing the rib specifications

Rib specifications sit in the bill of materials next to the body cloth, never inside a construction note where a costing team will miss them. Four fields: gauge, weight, composition and elastane percentage. Fabric specifications written this way can be quoted directly; written as an adjective they cannot be quoted at all.

Hood, cord and hardware

Say whether the hood is two-panel or three-panel. A three-panel hood has a centre gusset and sits rounder; a two-panel hood is flatter and more common. Both are correct — only one is what you drew.

Say whether the hood is lined, self-lined or single-layer, because it changes both hand-feel and price. Then the drawcord: flat or round, width, composition, length beyond the eyelet, and the tipping — metal, plastic or knotted. Then the eyelets: metal or stitched, with colour and finish if metal.

On a zip hoodie, name the zip. Coil or moulded tooth, its size, whether it is open-ended, the puller shape, and the tape colour. "Zip" on a tech pack is not a specification; it is a category.

Trims and labels

Trims and labels are the fields most often left until after sampling, which is exactly when they become a delay. Specify the main label and its attachment, care and content labels with the wording your market requires, any woven badge, and the hangtag. Cheap items with long lead times: naming them early costs nothing, leaving them blank costs a week.

Decoration: placement measured, not described

Give every print or embroidery placement as a measurement from a fixed point — normally centimetres down from the high point of shoulder, centred or offset by a stated distance. "Centre chest" is read differently by different people, and the difference is visible on the finished garment.

State the artwork size in millimetres, the method, and the colours as Pantone references. For embroidery, supply artwork at the size it will be stitched — designs that read well at 200 mm turn to mud at 60 mm, and digitising cannot rescue them.

Where a print crosses a seam or lands on the pocket, flag it. It is producible and it is harder, so it needs pricing as such rather than discovering on the line.

Pantone codes and colour counts

Give every colour a Pantone code, including the garment body. A screen print is priced per colour because each one is a separate screen, so a graphic described as "full colour" is not necessarily buildable at the price you were quoted. State the count you intend — four colours plus a white underbase is five screens, for example — and supply vector artwork at the size it will print.

If you do not have a tech pack and would rather not build one from scratch, our development team writes them from a sketch or a reference garment — that is our product development service.

The five omissions that cause most first-sample failures

From the packs factories receive, these are the blanks that produce a wrong sample and a lost fortnight far more often than anything else. Manufacturers see the same five gaps on pack after pack.

No hood measurements at all, so the hood is built to the factory block rather than yours
Rib specified as "matching" with no composition or elastane content
No tolerance given, so a garment 2 cm out is neither clearly right nor clearly wrong
Measurements taken off a worn reference garment that has already shrunk, quoted as target finished dimensions
No statement of whether measurements are before or after wash on a washed program — the two differ by several centimetres

Version history and factory communication

A tech pack is a living document, and the most expensive kind of missing information is the kind a brand corrected in an email nobody attached to it. Every change belongs back in the same document you create, with a version number on the cover and a dated revision history on the last page — the habit that separates a clothing label on its fifth order from one on its first.

Keeping one source of truth

Number each release and note what changed, so the factory makes the garment from the version you think it has. Where a decision is settled on a call, write it into the pack that day rather than trusting the thread. Good factory communication is not frequent communication — it is a document both sides can point at before bulk production starts.